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Cecilia: A Story of Modern Rome

by F. Marion Crawford · English · Gutenberg #31723 · 616,158 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cecilia: A Story of Modern Rome

Author: F. Marion Crawford


        
Release date: March 21, 2010 [eBook #31723]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CECILIA: A STORY OF MODERN ROME ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Joanna Johnston and the
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                                 CECILIA

                         A Story of Modern Rome

                                   BY

                           F. MARION CRAWFORD

             AUTHOR OF "SARACINESCA," "MARIETTA," "AVE ROMA
                            IMMORTALIS," ETC.


                                New York

                          THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                      LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
                                  1902

                           All rights reserved




                            Copyright, 1902,

                        By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

                 Set up and electrotyped October, 1902.

                           Sixteenth Thousand




                  *           NORWOOD PRESS           *
                  J. S. CUSHING & CO. - BERWICK & SMITH
                  *       NORWOOD MASS. U.S.A.        *




                                 CECILIA

                         A STORY OF MODERN ROME




                                CHAPTER I


Two men were sitting side by side on a stone bench in the forgotten
garden of the Arcadian Society, in Rome; and it was in early spring, not
long ago. Few people, Romans or strangers, ever find their way to that
lonely and beautiful spot beyond the Tiber, niched in a hollow of the
Janiculum below San Pietro in Montorio, where Beatrice Cenci sleeps. The
Arcadians were men and women who loved poetry in an artificial time,
took names of shepherds and shepherdesses, rhymed as best they could,
met in pleasant places to recite their verses, and played that the world
was young, and gentle, and sweet, and unpoisoned, just when it had
declined to one of its recurring periods of vicious old age. The Society
did not die with its times, and it still exists, less sprightly, less
ready to mask in pastorals, but rhyming, meeting, and reciting verses
now and then, in the old manner, though rarely in the old haunts. Even
now fresh inscriptions in honour of the Arcadians are set into the
stuccoed walls of the little terraced garden under the hill.

It is very peaceful there. Above, the concave wall of the small house of
meeting looks down upon circular tiers of brick seats, and beyond these
there are bushes and a little fountain. To the right and left,
symmetrical walks lead down in two wide curves to the lower levels,
where the water falls again into a basin in a shaded grotto, and rises
the third time in another fountain. An ancient stone-pine tree springs
straight upwards, spreading out lovely branches. There are bushes again
and a magnolia, and a Japanese medlar, and there is moss. The stone
mouldings of the fountains are rich with the green tints of time. The
air is softly damp, smelling of leaves and flowers; there are corners
into which the sunlight never shines, little mysteries of perpetual
shade that are full of sadness in winter, but in summer repeat the
fanciful confidences of a delicious and imaginary past.

The Sister who had let in the two visitors had left them to themselves,
and had gone back to the little convent door; for she was the portress,
and therefore a small judge of character in her way, and she understood
that the two gentlemen were not like the other half-dozen strangers who
came every year to see the garden, and went away after ten minutes,
dropping half a franc into her hand for the Sisters, and not even
lifting their hats to her as she let them out. These two evidently knew
the place; they spoke to each other as intimate friends do; they had
come to enjoy the peace and silence for an hour, and they would neither
carry off the flowers from the magnolia tree, as some did, nor scrawl
their names in pencil on the stucco. Therefore they might safely be left
to their own leisure and will.

The men were friends, as the portress had guessed; they were very
unlike, and their unlikeness was in part the reason of their friendship.
The one was squarely built, of average height, a man of action at every
point, with bold blue eyes that could be piercing, a rugged Roman head,
prominent at the brows, short reddish hair and pointed beard, great jaw
and cheek-bones, a tanned and freckled skin. He sat leaning back, one
leg crossed over the other, the knee that was upper-most pressing
against the stout stick he held across it, and the big veins swelled on
his hands and wrists. He was a sailor, and a born fighting man; and in
ten years of service he had managed to find himself in every affair that
had concerned Italy in the remotest degree, in Africa, in China, and
elsewhere. He was now at home on leave, expecting immediate promotion.
He bore a historical name; he was called Lamberto Lamberti.

His companion sat with folded arms and bent head, a rather dark young
man with deep-set grey eyes that often looked black, a thoughtful face,
a grave mouth that could smile suddenly and almost strangely, with a
child's sweet frankness, and yet with a look that was tender and
human--the smile of a man who understands the meaning of life and yet
does not despise it. Most people would have taken him for a man of
leisure, probably given to reading or the cultivation of some artistic
taste. Guido d'Este was one of those Italians who are content to survive
from a very beautiful past without joining the frantic rush for a very
problematic future. But there was more in him than a love of books and a
knowledge of pictures; for he was a dreamer, and there are dreams better
worth dreaming than many deeds are worth the doing.

"I sometimes wonder what would have happened to you and me," he said,
after there had been a long pause, "if we had been obliged to live each
other's lives."

"We should both have been bored to extinction," answered Lamberti,
without hesitating.

"I suppose so," assented Guido, and relapsed into silence.

He was very glad that he was not condemned to the life of a naval
officer, to the perpetual motion of active service, to the narrow
quarters of a lieutenant on a modern man-of-war, to the daily
companionship of a dozen or eighteen other officers with whom he could
certainly not have an idea in common. It would be a detestable thing to
be sent at a moment's notice from one end of the world to the other,
from heat to cold, from cold to heat, through all sorts of weather, only
to be a part of an organisation, a wheel in a machine, a pawn in some
one's game of chess. He had been on board a line-of-battle ship once to
see his friend off, and had mentally noted the discomfort. There was
nothing in the cabin but a bunk built over a chest of drawers, a narrow
transom, a wash-stand that disappeared into a recess when pushed back,
an exiguous table fastened to a bulkhead, and one camp-stool. There was
no particular means of ventilation, and the place smelt of cold iron,
paint, and soft soap. Yet his friend had been about to live at least six
months in this cell, which would have been condemned as too narrow in an
ordinarily well-managed prison.

Nevertheless, it would be pleasant in itself, no doubt, to be a living
part of what most men only read about, to really know what fighting
meant, to be one of the few who are invariably chosen first for missions
of danger and difficulty. Besides, Guido d'Este was just now in a very
difficult situation, which might become dangerous, and from which he saw
no immediate means of escape; and, for once in his life, he almost
envied his friend his simple career, in which nothing seemed to be
required of a man but courage and obedience.

"I suppose I should be bored," he said again, after a short and
thoughtful pause, "but I would rather be bored than live the life I am
living."

The sailor looked at him sharply a moment, and instantly understood that
Guido had brought him to the little garden in order to tell him
something of importance without risk of interruption.

"Have you had more trouble with that horrible old woman?" he asked
roughly.

"Yes. She is draining the life out of me. She will ruin me in the end."

Guido did not look up as he spoke, and he slowly tapped the hard earth
with the toe of his shoe. He felt very helpless, and he shook his head
over his misfortunes, which seemed great.

"That comes of being connected with royalty," said Lamberti, in the same
rough tone.

"Is it my fault?" asked Guido, with a melancholy smile.

The sailor snorted discontentedly, and changed his position.

"What can I do?" he asked presently. "Tell me."

"Nothing."

"If I were only rich!"

"My dear friend," said Guido, "she demands a million of francs!"

"There are men who have fifty. Would a hundred thousand francs be of any
use?"

"Not the least. Besides, that is all you have."

"What would that matter?" asked Lamberti.

Guido looked up at last, for he knew that the words were true and
earnest.

"Thank you," he answered. "I know you would do that for me. But it would
not be of any use. Things have gone too far."

"Shall I go to her and talk the matter over? I believe I could frighten
her into justice. After all, she has no legal claim upon you."

Guido shook his head.

"That is not the question," he answered. "She never pretends that her
right is legal, for it is not. On the contrary, she says it is a
question of honour, that I have lost her money for her in speculations,
and that I am bound to restore it to her. It is true that I only did
with it exactly what she wished, and what she insisted that I should do,
against my own judgment. She knows that."

"But then, I do not see----"

"She also knows that I cannot prove it," interrupted Guido, "and as she
is perfectly unscrupulous, she will use everything against me to make
out that I have deliberately cheated her out of the money."

"But it cannot make so much difference to her, after all," objected
Lamberti. "She must have an immense fortune somewhere."

"She is a miser, in spite of that sudden attack of the gaming fever.
Money is the only passion of her life."

"Possibly, though I doubt it. There is Monsieur Leroy, you know."

Lamberti spoke the name with contempt, but Guido said nothing, for,
after all, the high and mighty lady about whom they were talking was his
father's sister, and he preferred not to talk scandal about her, even
with his intimate friend.

"If matters grow worse," said Lamberti, "there are at least the
worthless securities in her name, to prove that you acted for her."

"You are mistaken. That is the worst of it. Everything was done in my
name, for she would not let her own appear. She used to give me the
money in cash, telling me exactly what to do with it, and I brought her
the broker's accounts."

"I daresay she made you sign receipts for the sums she gave you,"
laughed Lamberti.

"Yes, she did."

Lamberti sat up suddenly and stared at his friend. Such folly was hardly
to be believed.

"She is capable of saying that she lent you the money on your promise!"
he cried.

"That is exactly what she threatens to do," answered Guido d'Este,
dejectedly. "As I cannot possibly pay it, she can force me to do one of
two things."

"What things?"

"Either to disappear from honourable society and begin life somewhere
else, or else to make an end of myself. And she will do it. I have felt
for more than a year that she means to ruin me."

Lamberti set his teeth, and stared at the stone-pine. If Guido had not
been just the man he was, sensitive to morbidness where his honour was
concerned, the situation might have seemed less desperate. If his aunt,
her Serene Highness the Princess Anatolie, had not been a monster of
avarice, selfishness, and vindictiveness, there would perhaps have been
some hope of moving her. As it was, matters looked ill, and to make them
worse there was the well-known fact that Guido had formerly played high
and had lost considerable sums at cards. It would be easy to make
society believe that he had paid his debts, which had always been
promptly settled, with money which the Princess had intrusted to him for
investment.

"What possible object can she have in ruining you?" asked Lamberti,
presently.

"I cannot guess," Guido answered after another short pause. "I have
little enough left as it is, except the bare chance of inheriting
something, some day, from my brother, who likes me about as much as my
aunt does, and is not bound to leave me a penny."

"But, after all," argued Lamberti, "you are the only heir left to either
of them."

"I suppose so," assented Guido in an uncertain tone.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing--it does not matter. Of course," he continued quietly, "this
may go on for some time, but it can only end in one way, sooner or
later. I shall be lucky if I am only reduced to starvation."

"You might marry an heiress," suggested Lamberti, as a last resource.

"And pay my aunt out of my wife's fortune? No. I will not do that."

"Of course not. But I should think that if ever an honest man could be
tempted to do such a thing, it would be in some such case as yours."

"Perhaps to save his father from ruin, or his mother from starvation,"
said Guido. "I could understand it then; but not to save himself.
Besides, no heiress in our world would marry me, for I have nothing to
offer."

Lamberti smiled incredulously. He was not a cynic, because he believed
in action; but his faith in the disinterested simplicity of mankind was
not strong. He had also some experience of the world, and was quite
ready to admit that a marriageable heiress might fairly expect an
equivalent for the fortune she was to bring her husband. Yet he wholly
rejected the statement that Guido d'Este had nothing of social value to
offer, merely because he was now a poor man and had never been a very
rich one. Guido had neither lands nor money, and bore no title, it was
true; and could but just live like a gentleman on the small allowance
that was paid him yearly according to his father's will. But there was
no secret about his birth, and he was closely related to several of the
reigning houses of Europe. His father had been one of the minor
sovereigns dethroned in the revolutions of the nineteenth century; late
in life, a widower, the ex-king had married a beautiful young girl of no
great family, who had died in giving birth to Guido. The marriage had of
course been morganatic, though perfectly legal, and Guido neither bore
the name of his father's royal race, nor could he ever lay claim to the
succession, in the utterly improbable event of a restoration. But he was
half brother to the childless man, nearly forty years older than
himself, whose faithful friends still called him "your Majesty" in
private; he was nephew to the extremely authentic Princess Anatolie, and
he was first cousin to at least one king who had held his own. In the
eyes of an heiress in search of social position as an equivalent for her
millions, all this would more than compensate for the fact that his
visiting card bore the somewhat romantic and unlikely name, "Guido
d'Este," without any title or explanation whatever.

But apart from the sordid consideration of values to be given and
received, Guido was young, good-looking if not handsome, and rather
better gifted than most men; he had reached the age of twenty-seven
without having what society is pleased to call a past--in other words
without ever having been the chief actor in a social tragedy, comedy, or
farce; and finally, though he had once been fond of cards, he had now
entirely given up play. If he had been a little richer, he could almost
have passed for a model young man in the eyes of the exacting and
prudent parent of marriageable daughters. Judging from the Princess
Anatolie, it was probable that he resembled his mother's family more
than his father's.

For all these reasons his friend thought that, if he chose, he might
easily find an heiress who would marry him with enthusiasm; but, being
his friend, Lamberti was very glad that he rejected the idea.

The two were not men who ever talked together of their principles,
though they sometimes spoke of their beliefs and differed about them.
Belief is usually absolute, but principle is always a matter of
conscience, and the conscience is a part of the mixed self in which soul
and mind and matter are all involved together. Men born in the same
surroundings and brought up in the same way generally hold to the same
principles as guides in life, and show the same abhorrence for the sins
that are accounted dishonourable, and the same indulgence for those not
condemned by the code of honour, not even admitting discussion upon such
points. But the same men may have very different opinions about
spiritual matters.

Eliminating the vulgar average of society, there remain always a certain
number who, while possibly holding even more divergent beliefs than most
people, agree more precisely, or disagree more essentially, about
matters of conscience, either stretching or contracting the code of
honour according to their own temper, and especially according to the
traditions of their own most immediate surroundings. Other conditions
being favourable, it seems as if men whose consciences are most alike
should be the best fitted for each other's friendship, no matter what
they may think or believe about religion.

This was certainly the case with Guido d'Este and Lamberto Lamberti, and
they simultaneously dismissed, as detestable, dishonourable, and
unworthy, the mere thought that Guido should try to marry an heiress,
with a view to satisfying the outrageous claims of his ex-royal aunt,
the Princess Anatolie.

"In simpler times," observed Lamberti, who liked to recall the middle
ages, "we should have poisoned the old woman."

Guido did not smile.

"Without meaning to do her an injustice," he answered, "I think it much
more probable that she would have poisoned me."

"With the help of Monsieur Leroy, she might have succeeded."

At the thought of the man whom he so cordially detested, Lamberti's blue
eyes grew hard, and his upper lip tightened a little, just showing his
teeth under his red moustache. Guido looked at him and smiled in his
turn.

"There are your ferocious instincts again," he said; "you wish you could
kill him."

"I do," answered Lamberti, simply.

He rose from his seat and stretched himself a little, as some big dogs
always do after the preliminary growl at an approaching enemy.

"I think Monsieur Leroy is the most repulsive human being I ever saw,"
he said. "I am not exactly a sensitive person, but it makes me very
uncomfortable to be near him. He once gave me his hand, and I had to
take it. It felt like a live toad. How old is that man?"

"He must be forty," said Guido, "but he is wonderfully well preserved.
Any one would take him for five-and-thirty."

"It is disgusting!" Lamberti kicked a pebble away, as he stood.

"He looked just as he does now, when I was seventeen," observed Guido.

"The creature paints his face. I am sure of it."

"No. I have seen him drenched in a shower, when he had no umbrella. The
rain ran down his cheeks, but the colour did not change."

"It is all the more disgusting," retorted Lamberti, illogically, but
with strong emphasis.

Guido rose from his seat rather wearily. As he stood up, he was much
taller than his friend, who had seemed the larger man while both were
seated.

"I am glad that we have talked this over," he said. "Not that talking
can help matters, of course. It never does. But I wanted you to know
just how things stand, in case anything should happen to me."

Lamberti turned rather sharply.

"In case what should happen to you?" he asked, his eyes hardening.

"I am very tired of it all," Guido answered, "I have nothing to live
for, and I am being driven straight to disgrace and ruin without any
fault of my own. I daresay that some day I may--well, you know what I
mean."

"What?"

"I should not care to exile myself to South America. I am not fit for
that sort of life."

"Well?"

"There is the other alternative," said Guido, with a tuneless little
laugh. "When life is intolerable, what can be simpler than to part with
it?"

Lamberti's strong hand was already on his friend's arm, and tightened
energetically.

"Do you believe in God?" he asked abruptly.

"No. At least, I think not."

"I do," said Lamberti, with conviction, "and I shall not let you make
away with yourself if I can help it."

He loosed his hold, thrust his hands into his pockets, and looked as if
he wished he could fight somebody or something.

"A man who kills himself to escape his troubles is a coward," he said.

Guido made a gesture of indifference.

"You know very well that I am not a coward," he said.

"You will be, the day you are afraid to go on living," returned his
friend. "If you kill yourself, I shall think you are an arrant coward,
and I shall be sorry I ever knew you."

Guido looked at him incredulously.

"Are you in earnest?" he asked.

"Yes."

There was no mistaking the look in Lamberti's hard blue eyes. Guido
faced him.

"Do you think that every man who commits suicide is a coward?"

"If it is to escape his own troubles, yes. A man who gives his life for
his country, his mother, or his wife, is not a coward, though he may
kill himself with his own hand."

"The Church would call him a suicide."

"I do not know, in all cases," said Lamberti. "I am not a theologian,
and as the Church means nothing to you, it would be of no use if I
were."

"Why do you say that the Church means nothing to me?" Guido asked.

"Since you are an atheist, what meaning can it possibly have?"

"It means the whole tradition of morality by which we live, and our
fathers lived. Even the code of honour, which is a little out of shape
nowadays, is based on Christianity, and was once the rule of a good
life, the best rule in the days when it grew up."

"I daresay. Even the code of honour, degenerate as it is, and twist it
how you will, cannot give you an excuse for killing yourself when you
have always behaved honourably, or for running away from the enemy
simply because you are tired of fighting and will not take the trouble
to go on."

"Perhaps you are right," Guido answered. "But the whole question is not
worth arguing. What is life, after all, that we should attach any
importance to it?"

"It is all you have, and you only have it once."

"Who knows? Perhaps we may come back to it again, hundreds and hundreds
of times. There are more people in the world who believe that than there
are Christians."

"If that is what you believe," retorted Lamberti, "you must believe that
the sooner you leave life, the sooner you will come back to it."

"Possibly. But there is a chance that it may not be true, and that
everything may end here. That one chance may be worth taking."

"There is a chance that a man who deserts from his ship may not be
caught. That is not an argument in favour of desertion."

Guido laughed carelessly.

"You have a most unpleasant way of naming things," he said. "Shall we
go? It is growing late, and I have promised to see my aunt before
dinner."

"Will there be any one else there?" asked Lamberti.

"Why? Did you think of going with me?"

"I might. It is a long time since I have called. I think I shall be a
little more assiduous in future."

"It is not gay, at my aunt's," observed Guido. "Monsieur Leroy will be
there. You may have to shake hands with him!"

"You do not seem anxious that I should go with you," laughed Lamberti.

Guido said nothing for a moment, and seemed to be weighing the question,
as if it might be of some importance. Lamberti afterwards remembered the
slight hesitation.

"By all means come," Guido said, when he had made up his mind.

He glanced once more at the place, for he liked it, and it was pleasant
to carry away pictures of what one liked, even of a bit of neglected old
garden with a stone-pine in the middle, clearly cut out against the sky.
He wondered idly whether he should ever come again--whether, after all,
it would be cowardly to go to sleep with the certainty of not waking,
and whether he should find anything beyond, or not.

The world looked too familiar to him to be interesting, as if he had
known it too long, and he vaguely wished that he could change it, and
desire to stay in it for its own sake; and just then it occurred to him
that every man carries with him the world in which he must live, the
stage and the scenery for his own play. It would be absurd to pretend,
he thought, that his own material world was the same as Lamberti's, even
when the latter was at home. They knew the same people, heard the same
talk, ate the same things, looked on the same sights, breathed the same
air. There was perhaps no sacrifice worthy of honourable men which
either of them would not make for the other. Yet, to Guido d'Este, life
seemed miserably indifferent where it did not seem a real calamity,
while to Lamberti every second of it was worth fighting for, because it
was worth enjoying.

Guido looked at his friend's tanned neck and sturdy shoulders, following
him to the door, and he realised more clearly than ever before that he
was not of the same race. He felt the satiety bred in many generations
of destiny's spoilt and flattered sons; the absence of anything like a
grasping will, caused by the too easy fulfilment of every careless wish;
the over-critical sense that guesses at hidden imperfection, the cruelly
unerring instinct of a taste too tired to enjoy and yet too fine to be
deceived.

Lamberti turned at the door and saw his face.

"What are you thinking about?"

"I was envying you," Guido murmured. "You are glad to be alive."

Lamberti made rather an impatient gesture, but said nothing. The Sister
who had admitted the two opened the little iron door for them to go out.
She was a small woman, with a worn face and kind brown eyes, one of the
half-dozen who live in the little convent and work among the children of
the very poor in that quarter. Both men had taken out money.

"For the poor children, if you please," said Guido, placing his offering
in the nun's hand.

"And tell them to pray for a man who is in trouble," added Lamberti,
giving her money.

She looked at him curiously, thinking, perhaps, that
he meant himself. Then she gravely bent her head.

"I thank you very much," she said.

The small iron door closed with a rusty clang, and the friends began to
descend the steep way that leads down from the Porta San Pancrazio to
the Via Garibaldi.

"Why did you say that to the nun?" asked Guido.

"Are you past praying for?" enquired Lamberti, with a careless and
good-natured laugh.

"It is not like you," said Guido.

"I do not pretend to be more consistent than other people, you know. Are
you going directly to the Princess's?"

"No. I must go home first. The old lady would never forgive me if I went
to see her without a silk hat in my hand."

"Then I suppose I must dress, too," said Lamberti. "I will leave you at
your door, and drive home, and we can meet at your aunt's."

"Very well."

They walked down the street and found a cab, scarcely speaking again
until they parted at Guido's door.

He lived alone in a quiet apartment of the Palazzo Farnese, overlooking
the Via Giulia and the river beyond. The afternoon sun was still
streaming through the open windows of his sitting room, and the warm
breeze came with it.

"There are two notes, sir," said his servant, who had followed him. "The
one from the Princess is urgent. The man wished to wait for you, but I
sent him away."

"That was right," said Guido, taking the letters from the salver. "Get
my things ready. I have visits to make."

The man went out and shut the door. He was a Venetian, and had been in
the navy, where he had served Lamberti during the affair in China.
Lamberti had recommended him to his friend.

Guido remained standing while he opened the note. The first was an
engraved invitation to a garden party from a lady he scarcely knew. It
was the first he had ever received from her, and he was not aware that
she ever asked people to her house. The second was from his aunt,
begging him to come to tea that afternoon as he had promised, for a very
particular reason, and asking him to let her know beforehand if anything
made it impossible. It began with "Dearest Guido" and was signed "Your
devoted aunt, Anatolie." She was evidently very anxious that he should
come, for he was generally her "dear nephew," and she was his
"affectionate aunt."

The handwriting was fine and hard to read, though it was regular. Some
of the letters were quite unlike those of most people, and many of them
were what experts call "blind."

Guido d'Este read the note through twice, with an expression of dislike,
and then tore it up. He threw the invitation upon some others that lay
in a chiselled copper dish on his writing table, lit a cigarette, and
looked out of the window. His aunt's note was too affectionate and too
anxious to bode well, and he was tempted to write that he could not go.
It would be pleasant to end the afternoon with a book and a cup of tea,
and then to dine alone and dream away the evening in soothing silence.

But he had promised to go; and, moreover, nothing was of any real
importance at all, nothing whatsoever, from the moment of beginning life
to the instant of leaving it. He therefore dressed and went out again.




                               CHAPTER II


Lamberto Lamberti never wasted time, whether he was at sea, doing his
daily duty as an officer, or ashore in Africa, fighting savages, or on
leave, amusing himself in Rome, or Paris, or London. Time was life, and
life was far too good to be squandered in dawdling. In ten minutes after
he had reached his room he was ready to go out again. As he took his hat
and gloves, his eye fell on a note which he had not seen when he had
come in.

He opened it carelessly and found the same formal invitation which Guido
had received at the same time. The Countess Fortiguerra requested the
pleasure of his company at the Villa Palladio between four and six, and
the date was just a fortnight ahead.

Lamberti was a Roman, and though he had only seen the Countess three or
four times in his life, he remembered very well that she had been twice
married, and that her first husband had been a certain Count Palladio,
whose name was vaguely connected in Lamberti's mind with South American
railways, the Suez Canal, and a machine gun that had been tried in the
Italian navy; but it was not a Roman name, and he could not remember any
villa that was called by it. Palladio--it recalled something else,
besides a great architect--something connected with Pallas--but
Lamberti was no great scholar. Guido would know. Guido knew everything
about literature, ancient and modern--or at least Lamberti thought so.

He had kept his cab while he dressed, and in a few minutes the little
horse had toiled up the long hill that leads to Porta Pinciana, and
Lamberti got out at the gate of one of those beautiful villas of which
there are still a few within the walls of Rome. It belonged to a
foreigner of infinite taste, whose love of roses was proverbial. A
legend says that some of them were watered with the most carefully
prepared beef tea from the princely kitchen. The rich man had gone back
to his own country, and the Princess Anatolie had taken the villa and
meant to spend the rest of her life there. She was only seventy years
old, and had made up her mind to live to be a hundred, so that it was
worth while to make permanent arrangements for her comfort.

Lamberti might have driven through the gate and up to the house, but he
was not sure whether the Princess liked to see such plebeian vehicles as
cabs in her grounds. He had a strong suspicion that, in spite of her
royal blood, she had the soul of a snob, and thought much more about
appearances than he did; and as for Monsieur Leroy, he was one of the
most complete specimens of the snob species in the world. Therefore
Lamberti, who now had reasons for wishing to propitiate the dwellers in
the villa, left his cab outside and walked up the steep drive to the
house.

He did not look particularly well in a frock coat and high hat. He was
too muscular, his hair was too red, his neck was too sunburnt, and he
was more accustomed to wearing a uniform or the rough clothes in which
fighting is usually done. The footman looked at him and did not
recognise him.

"Her Highness is not at home," said the man, coolly.

A private carriage was waiting at a little distance from the porch, and
the footman who belonged to it was lounging in the vestibule within.

"Be good enough to ask whether her Highness will see me," said Lamberti.

The fellow looked at him again, and evidently made up his mind that it
would be safer to obey a red-haired gentleman who had such a very
unusual look in his eyes and spoke so quietly, for he disappeared
without making any further objection.

When Lamberti entered the drawing-room, he was aware that the Princess
was established in a high arm-chair near a tea-table, that Monsieur
Leroy was coming towards him, and that an elderly lady in a hat was
seated near the Princess in an attitude which may be described as one of
respectful importance. He was aware of the presence of these three
persons in the room, but he only saw the fourth, a young girl, standing
beside the table with a cup in her hand, and just turning her face
towards him with a look that was like a surprised recognition after not
having seen him for a very long time. He started perceptibly as his eyes
met hers, and he almost uttered an exclamation of astonishment.

He was checked by feeling Monsieur Leroy's toad-like hand in his.

"Her Highness is very glad to see you," said an oily voice in French,
but with a thick and rolling pronunciation that was South American
unless it was Roumanian.

For once Lamberti did not notice the sensual, pink and white face, the
hanging lips, the colourless brown hair, the insolent eyes, the
effeminate figure and dress of the little man he detested, and whose
mere touch was disgusting to him. By a strong effort he went directly up
to the Princess without looking again at the young girl whose presence
had affected him so oddly.

Princess Anatolie was gracious enough to give him her hand to kiss; he
bent over it, and his lips touched a few of the cold precious stones in
the rings that loaded her fingers. She had not changed in the year that
had passed since he had seen her, except that her eyes looked smaller
than ever and nearer together. Her hair might or might not be her own,
for it was carefully crimped and arranged upon her forehead; it was not
certain that her excellent teeth were false; there was about her an air
of youth and vitality that was really surprising, and yet it was
impossible not to feel that she might be altogether a marvellous sham,
on the verge of dissolution.

"This is most charming!" she said, in a voice that was not cracked, but
rang false. "I expect my nephew, Guido, at any moment. He is your great
friend, is he not? Yes, I never forget anything. This is my nephew
Guido's great friend," she continued volubly, and turning to the elderly
lady on her right, "Prince Lamberti."

"Don Lamberto Lamberti," said Monsieur Leroy in a low voice, correcting
her. But even this was not quite right.

"I have the good fortune to know the Countess Fortiguerra," said
Lamberti, bowing, as he suddenly recognised her, but very much surprised
that she should be there. "I have just received a very kind invitation
from you," he added, as she gave him her hand.

"I hope you will come," she said quietly. "I knew your mother very well.
We were at the school of the Sacred Heart together."

Lamberti bent his head a little, in acknowledgment of the claim upon him
possessed by one of his mother's school friends.

"I shall do my best to come," he answered.

He felt that the young girl was watching him, and he ventured to look at
her, with a little movement, as if he wished to be introduced. Again he
felt the absolute certainty of having met her before, somewhere, very
long ago--so long ago that she could not have been born then, and he
must have been a small boy. Therefore what he felt was absurd.

"Cecilia," said the Countess, speaking to the girl, "this is Signor
Lamberto Lamberti." "My daughter," she explained, as he bowed, "Cecilia
Palladio."

"Most charming!" cried the Princess, "the son and the daughter of two
old friends."

"Touching," echoed Monsieur Leroy. "Such a picture! There is true
sentiment in it."

Lamberti did not hear, but Cecilia Palladio did, and a straight shadow,
fine as a hair line, appeared for an instant, perpendicular between her
brows, while she looked directly at the man before her. A moment later
Lamberti was seated between her and her mother, and Monsieur Leroy had
resumed the position he had left to welcome the newcomer, sitting on a
very low cushioned stool almost at the Princess's feet.

In formal circumstances, a man who has been long in the army or navy can
usually trust himself not to show astonishment or emotion, and after the
first slight start of surprise, which only Monsieur Leroy had seen,
Lamberti had behaved as if nothing out of the common way had happened to
him. But he had felt as if he were in a dream, while healthily sure that
he was awake; and now that he was more at ease, he began to examine the
cause of his inward disturbance.

It was not only out of the question to suppose that he had ever before
now met Cecilia Palladio, but he was quite certain that he had never
seen any one who was at all like her.

If extinct types of men could be revived now and then, of those which
the world once thought admirable and tried to copy, it would be
interesting to see how many persons of taste would acknowledge any
beauty in them. Cecilia Palladio had been eighteen years old early in
the winter, and in the usual course of things would have made her
appearance in society during the carnival season. The garden party for
which her mother had now sent out invitations was to take the place of
the dance which should have been given in January. Afterwards, when it
was over, and everybody had seen her, some people said that she was
perfectly beautiful, others declared that she was a freak of nature and
would soon be hideous, but, meanwhile, was an interesting study; one
young gentleman, addicted to art, said that her face belonged to the
type seen in the Elgin marbles; a Sicilian lady said that her head was
even more archaic than that, and resembled a fragment from the temples
of Selinunte, preserved in the museum at Palermo; and the Russian
ambassador, who was of unknown age, said that she was the perfect Psyche
of Naples, brought to life, and that he wished he were Eros.

In southern Europe what is called the Greek type of beauty is often
seen, and does not surprise any one. Many people think it cold and
uninteresting. It was a small something in the arch of the brows, it was
a very slight upward turn of the point of the nose, it was the small
irregularity of the broader and less curving upper lip that gave to
Cecilia Palladio's face the force and character that are so utterly
wanting in the faces of the best Greek statues. The Greeks, by the time
they had gained the perfect knowledge of the human body that produced
the Hermes of Olympia, had made a conventional mask of the human face,
and rarely ever tried to give it a little of the daring originality that
stands out in the features of many a crudely archaic statue. The artist
who made the Psyche attempted something of the kind, for the right side
of the face differs from the left, as it generally does in living
people. The right eyebrow is higher and more curved than the left one,
which lends some archness to the expression, but its effect is destroyed
by the tiresome perfection of the simpering mouth.

Cecilia Palladio was not like a Greek statue, but she looked as if she
had come alive from an age in which the individual ranked above the many
as a model, and in which nothing accidentally unfit for life could
survive and nothing degenerate had begun to be. With the same general
proportion, there was less symmetry in her face than in those of modern
beauties, and there was more light, more feeling, more understanding.
She was very fair, but her eyes were not blue; it would have been hard
to define their colour, and sometimes there seemed to be golden lights
in them. While she was standing, Lamberti had seen that she was almost
as tall as himself, and therefore taller than most women; and she was
slender, and moved like a very perfectly proportioned young wild animal,
continuously, but without haste, till each motion was completed in rest.
Most men and women really move in a succession of very short movements,
entirely interrupted at more or less perceptible intervals. If our sight
were perfect we should see that people walk, for instance, by a series
of jerks so rapid as to be like the vibrations of a humming-bird's
wings. Perhaps this is due to the unconscious exercise of the human will
in every voluntary motion, for a man who moves in his sleep seems to
move continuously like an animal, till he has changed his position and
rests again.

Lamberti made none of these reflections, and did not analyse the face he
could not help watching whenever the chance of conversation allowed him
to look at Cecilia without seeming to stare at her. He only tried to
discover why her face was so familiar to him.

"We have been in Paris all winter," said her mother, in answer to some
question of his.

"They have been in Paris all winter!" cried the Princess. "Think what
that means! The cold, the rain, the solitude! What in the world did you
do with yourselves?"

"Cecilia wished to continue her studies," answered the Countess
Fortiguerra.

"What sort of things have you been learning, Mademoiselle?" asked
Lamberti.

"I followed a course of lectures on philosophy at the Sorbonne, and I
read Nietzsche with a man who had known him," answered the young lady,
as naturally as if she had said that she had been taking lessons on the
piano.

A momentary silence followed, and everybody stared at the girl, except
her mother, who smiled pleasantly and looked from one to the other with
the expression which mothers of prodigies often assume, and which
clearly says: "I did it. Is it not perfectly wonderful?"

Then Monsieur Leroy laughed, in spite of himself.

"Hush, Doudou!" cried the Princess. "You are very rude!"

No one present chanced to know that she always called him Doudou when
she was in a good humour. Cecilia Palladio turned her head quietly,
fixed her eyes on him and laughed, deliberately, long, and very sweetly.
Monsieur Leroy met her gaze for a moment, then looked away and moved
uneasily on his low seat.

"What are you laughing at?" he asked, in a tone of annoyance.

"It seems so funny that you should be called Doudou--at your age,"
answered Cecilia.

"Really--" Monsieur Leroy looked at the Princess as if asking for
protection. She laughed good-humouredly, somewhat to Lamberti's
surprise.

"You are very direct with my friends, my dear," she said to Cecilia,
still smiling. The Countess Fortiguerra, not knowing exactly what to do,
also smiled, but rather foolishly.

"I am very sorry," said Cecilia, with contrition, and looking down. "I
really beg Monsieur Leroy's pardon. I could not help it."

But she had been revenged, for she had made him ridiculous.

"Not at all, not at all," he answered, in a tone that did not promise
forgiveness. Lamberti wondered what sort of man Palladio had been, since
the girl did not at all resemble her mother, who had clearly been pretty
and foolish in her youth, and had only lost her looks as she grew older.
The obliteration of middle age had set in.

There might have been some awkwardness, but it was dispelled by the
appearance of Guido, who came in unannounced at that moment, glancing
quickly at each of the group as he came forward, to see who was there.

"At last!" exclaimed the Princess, with evident satisfaction. "How late
you are, my dear," she said as Guido ceremoniously kissed her hand.

"I am very sorry," he said. "I was out when your note came. But I should
have come in any case."

"You know the Countess Fortiguerra, of course," said the Princess.

"Certainly," answered Guido, who had not recognised the lady at all, and
was glad to be told who she was, and that he knew her.

Lamberti watched him closely, for he understood every shade of his
friend's expression and manner. Guido shook hands with a pleasant smile,
and then glanced at Cecilia.

"My nephew, Guido d'Este," said the Princess, introducing him.

Cecilia looked at him quietly, and bent her head in acknowledgment of
the introduction.

"My daughter," murmured the Countess Fortiguerra, with satisfaction.

"Mademoiselle Palladio and her mother have just come back from Paris,"
explained Monsieur Leroy officiously, as Guido nodded to him.

Guido caught the name, and was glad of the information it conveyed, and
he sat down between the young girl and her mother. Lamberti was now
almost sure that his friend was not especially struck by Cecilia's face;
but she looked at him with some interest, which was not at all to be
wondered at, considering his looks, his romantic name, and his
half-royal birth. For the first time Lamberti envied him a little, and
was ashamed of it.

Barely an hour earlier he had wished that he could make Guido more like
himself, and now he wished that he were more like Guido.

"The Countess has been kind enough to ask me to her garden party," Guido
said, looking at his aunt, for he instinctively connected the latter's
anxiety to see him with the invitation.

So did Lamberti, and it flashed upon him that this meeting was the first
step in an attempt to marry his friend to Cecilia Palladio. The girl was
probably an heiress, and Guido's aunt saw a possibility of recovering
through her the money she had lost in speculations.

This explanation did not occur to Guido, simply because he was bored and
was already thinking of an excuse for getting away after staying as
short a time as possible.

"I hope you will come," said Cecilia, rather unexpectedly.

"Of course he will," the Princess answered for him, in an encouraging
tone.

"The villa is really very pretty," continued the young girl.

"Let me see," said Guido, who liked her voice as soon as she spoke, "the
Villa Palladio--I do not quite remember where it is."

"It used to be the Villa Madama," explained Monsieur Leroy. "I have
always wondered who the 'Madama' was, after whom it was called. It seems
such a foolish name."

The Princess looked displeased, and bit her lip a little.

"I think," said Guido, as if suggesting a possibility, rather than
stating a fact, "that she was a daughter of the Emperor Charles the
Fifth, who was Duchess of Parma."

"Of course, of course!" cried Monsieur Leroy, eagerly assenting, "I had
forgotten!"

"My daughter's guardians bought it for her not long ago," explained the
Countess Fortiguerra, "with my approval, and we have of course changed
the name."

"Naturally," said Guido, gravely, but looking at Lamberti, who almost
smiled under his red beard. "And you approved of the change,
Mademoiselle," Guido added, turning to Cecilia, and with an
interrogation in his voice.

"Not at all," she answered, with sudden coldness. "It was Goldbirn--"

"Yes," said the Countess, weakly, "it was Baron Goldbirn who insisted
upon it, in spite of us."

"Goldbirn--Goldbirn," repeated the Princess vaguely. "The name has a
familiar sound."

"Your Highness has a current account with them in Vienna," observed
Monsieur Leroy.

"Yes, yes, certainly. Doudou acts as my secretary sometimes, you know."

The information seemed necessary, as Monsieur Leroy's position had been
far from clear.

"Baron Goldbirn was associated with Cecilia's father in some railways in
South America," said the Countess, "and is her principal guardian. He
will always continue to manage her fortune for her, I hope."

Clearly, Cecilia was an heiress, and was to marry Guido d'Este as soon
as the matter could be arranged. That was the Princess's plan. Lamberti
thought that it remained to be seen whether Guido would agree to the
match.

"Has Baron Goldbirn made many--improvements--in the Villa Madama?"
enquired Guido, hesitating a little, perhaps intentionally.

"Oh no!" Cecilia answered. "He lets me do as I please about such
things."

"And what has been your pleasure?" asked Guido, with a beginning of
interest, as well as for the sake of hearing her young voice, which
contrasted pleasantly with her mother's satisfied purring and the
Princess's disagreeable tone.

"I got the best artist I could find to restore the whole place as nearly
as possible to what it was meant to be. I am satisfied with the result.
So is my mother," she added, with an evident afterthought.

"My daughter is very artistic," the Countess explained.

Cecilia looked at Guido, and a faint smile illuminated her face for a
moment. Guido bent his head almost imperceptibly, as if to say that he
knew what she meant, and it seemed to Lamberti that the two already
understood each other. He rose to go, moved by an impulse he could not
resist. Guido looked at him in surprise, for he had expected his friend
to wait for him.

"Must you go already?" asked the Princess, in a colourless tone that did
not invite Lamberti to stay. "But I suppose you are very busy when you
are in Rome. Good-bye."

As he took his leave, his eyes met Cecilia's. It might have been only
his imagination, after all, but he felt sure that her whole expression
changed instantly to a look of deep and sincere understanding, even of
profound sympathy.

"I hope you will come to the villa," she said gravely, and she seemed to
wait for his answer.

"Thank you. I shall be there."

There was a short silence, as Monsieur Leroy went with him to the door
at the other end of the long room, but Cecilia did not watch him; she
seemed to be interested in a large portrait that hung opposite the
nearest window, and which was suddenly lighted up by the glow of the
sunset. It represented a young king, standing on a step, in coronation
robes, with a vast ermine mantle spreading behind him and to one side,
and an uncomfortable-looking crown on his head; a sceptre lay on a
highly polished table at his elbow, beside an open arch, through which
the domes and spires of a city were visible. There was no particular
reason why he should be standing there, apparently alone, and in a
distinctly theatrical attitude, and the portrait was not a good picture;
but Cecilia looked at it steadily till she heard the door shut, after
Lamberti had gone out.

"Your friend is not a very gay person," observed the Princess. "Is he
always so silent?"

"Yes," Guido answered. "He is not very talkative."

"Do you like silent people?" enquired Cecilia.

"I like a woman who can talk, and a man who can hold his tongue,"
replied Guido readily.

Cecilia looked at him and smiled carelessly. The Princess rose slowly,
but she was so short, and her arm-chair was so high, that she seemed to
walk away from it without being any taller than when she had been
sitting, rather than really to get up.

"Shall we go into the garden?" she suggested. "It is not too cold.
Doudou, my cloak!"

Monsieur Leroy brought a pretty confusion of mouse-coloured silk and
lace, disentangled it skilfully, and held it up behind the Princess's
shoulders. It looked like a big butterfly as he spread it in the air,
and it had ribands that hung down to the floor.

When she had put it on, the Princess led the way to a long window, which
Leroy opened, and leaning lightly on the Countess Fortiguerra's arm, she
went out into the evening light. She evidently meant to give the young
people a chance of talking together by themselves, for as soon as they
were outside she sent Monsieur Leroy away.

"My dear Doudou!" she cried, as if suddenly remembering something, "we
have quite forgotten those invitations for to-morrow! Should you mind
writing them now, so that they can be sent before dinner?"

Monsieur Leroy disappeared with an alacrity which suggested that the
plan had been arranged beforehand.

"Take Mademoiselle Palladio round the garden, Guido," said the Princess.
"We will walk a little before the house till you come back. It is drier
here."

Guido must have been dull indeed if he had not at last understood why he
had been made to come, and what was expected of him. He was annoyed, and
raised his eyebrows a little.

"Will you come, Mademoiselle?" he asked coldly.

"Yes," answered Cecilia in a constrained tone, for she understood as
well as Guido himself.

Her mother was often afraid of her, and had not dared to tell her that
the whole object of their visit was that she should see Guido and be
seen by him. She thought that the Princess was really pushing matters
too hastily, considering the time-honoured traditions of Latin
etiquette, which forbid that young people should be left alone together
for a moment, even when engaged to be married. But the Countess had
great faith in the correctness of anything which such a very high-born
person as the Princess Anatolie chose to suggest, and as the latter held
her by the arm with affectionate condescension, she could not possibly
run after her daughter.

The two moved away in silence towards the flower garden, and soon
disappeared round the corner of the house.

"The roses are pretty," said Guido, apologetically. "My aunt likes
people to see them."

"They are magnificent," answered Cecilia, without enthusiasm, and after
a suitable interval.

They went on, along a narrow gravel path, and though there was really
room enough for Guido to walk by her side, he pretended that there was
not, and followed her. She was very graceful, and he would not have
thought of denying it. He even looked at her as she went before him, and
he noticed the fact; but after he had taken cognisance of it, he was
quite as indifferent as before. He no longer thought her voice pleasant,
in his resentment at finding that a trap had been laid for him.

"You see, there are a good many kinds of roses," he observed, because it
would have been rude to say nothing at all. "They are not all in flower
yet."

"It is only the beginning of May," the young girl answered, without
interest.

They came to the broader walk on the other side of the plot of roses,
and Guido had to walk by her side again.

"I like your friend," she said suddenly.

"I am very glad," Guido replied, unbending at once and quietly looking
at her now. "People do not always like him at first sight."

"No, I understand that. He has the look in his eyes that men get who
have killed."

"Has he?" Guido seemed surprised. "Yes, he killed several men in Africa,
when he was alone against many, and they meant to murder him. He is
brave. Make him tell you about it, if you can induce him to talk."

"Is that so very hard?" Cecilia laughed. "Is he really more silent than
you?"

"Nobody ever called me silent," answered Guido, smiling. "I suppose you
thought so--stopped.

"Because I did not know how to begin, and because you would not. Is that
what you were going to say?"

"It is very near the truth," Guido admitted, very much amused.

"I do not blame you," said Cecilia. "How could you suppose that a mere
girl like me could possibly have anything to say--a child that has not
even been to her first party?"

"Perhaps I was afraid that the mere child might talk about philosophy
and Nietzsche," suggested Guido.

"And that would be dreadful, of course! Why? Is there any reason why a
girl should not study such things? If there is, tell me. No one ever
tells me what I ought to do."

"It is quite unnecessary, I have no doubt," Guido answered promptly, and
smiling again.

"You mean quite useless, because I should not do it?"

"Why should I be supposed to know that you are spoiled--if you are?
Besides, you must not take up a man every time he makes you a silly
compliment."

"Ah, now you are telling me what I ought to do! I like that better.
Thank you!" Guido was amused.

"Are you really grateful?" he asked, laughing a little. "Do you always
speak the truth?"

"Yes! Do you?" She asked the question sharply, as if she meant to
surprise him.

"I never lied to a man in my life," Guido answered.

"But you have to women?"

"I suppose so," said Guido, considerably diverted. "Most of us do, in
moments of enthusiasm."

"Really! And--are you often--enthusiastic?"

"No. Very rarely. Besides, I do not know whether it is worse in a man to
tell fibs to please a woman, than it is in a woman to disbelieve what an
honest man tells her on his word. Which is the least wrong, do you
think?"

"But since you admit that most men do not tell the truth to women----"

"I said, on one's word of honour. There is a difference."

"In theory," said Cecilia.

"Are there theories about lying?" asked Guido.

"Oh yes," answered the young girl, without hesitation. "There is
Puffendorf's, for instance, in his book on the Law of Nature and
Nations----"

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Guido.

"Certainly. He makes out that there is a sort of unwritten agreement
amongst all men that words shall be used in a definite sense which
others can understand. That sounds sensible. And then, Saint Augustin,
and La Placette, and Noodt----"

"My dear young lady, you have led me quite out of my depth! What do
those good people say?"

"That all lying is absolutely wrong in itself, whether it harms anybody
or not."

"And what do you think about it? That would be much more interesting to
know."

"I told you, I always tell the truth," Cecilia answered demurely.

"Oh yes, of course! I had forgotten."

"And you do not believe it," laughed the young girl. "It is time to go
back to the house."

"If you will stay a little longer, I will believe everything you tell
me."

"No, it is late," answered Cecilia, her manner suddenly changing as the
laugh died out of her voice.

She walked on quickly, and he kept behind her.

"I shall certainly go to your garden party," said Guido.

"Shall you?"

She spoke in a tone of such utter indifference that Guido stared at her
in surprise. A moment later they had rejoined her mother and the
Princess.




                               CHAPTER III


At the beginning of the twentieth century Rome has become even more
cosmopolitan than it used to be, for the Romans themselves are turning
into cosmopolitans, and the old traditional, serious, gloomy, and
sometimes dramatic life of the patriarchal system has almost died out.
One meets Romans of historical names everywhere, nowadays, in London, in
Paris, and in Vienna, speaking English and French, and sometimes German,
with extraordinary correctness, as much at home, to all appearance, in
other capitals as they are in their own, and intimately familiar with
the ways of many societies in many places.

Cecilia Palladio, at eighteen years of age, had probably not spent a
third of her life in Rome, and had been educated in different parts of
the world and in a variety of ways. Her father, Count Palladio, as has
been explained, had been engaged in promoting a number of undertakings,
of which several had succeeded, and at his death, which had happened
when Cecilia had been eight years old, he had left her part of his
considerable fortune in safe guardianship, leaving his wife a life
interest in the remainder. His old ally, the banker Solomon Goldbirn of
Vienna, had administered the whole inheritance with wisdom and
integrity, and at her marriage Cecilia would dispose of several millions
of francs, and would ultimately inherit as much more from her mother's
share. From a European point of view, she was therefore a notable
heiress, and even in the new world of millionnaires she would at least
have been considered tolerably well off, though by no means what is
there called rich.

Two years after Palladio's death her mother had married Count
Fortiguerra, who had begun life in the army, then passed to diplomacy,
had risen rapidly to the post of ambassador, and had died suddenly at
Madrid when barely fifty years old, and when Cecilia was sixteen.

The girl had a clear recollection of her own father, though she had
never been with him very much, as his occupations constantly took him to
distant parts of the world. He had seemed an old man to her, and had
indeed been much older than her mother, for he had been a patriot in the
later days of the Italian revolutions, and when still young he had been
with Garibaldi in 1860. Cecilia remembered him a tall, active,
grey-haired man with a pointed beard and big moustaches, and eyes which
she now knew had been like her own. She remembered his unbounded energy,
his patriotic and sometimes rather boastful talk, his black cigars, the
vast heap of papers that always seemed to be in hopeless confusion on
his writing table when he was at home, and the numerous
eccentric-looking people who used to come and see him. She had been told
that he was never to be disturbed, and never to be questioned, and that
he was a great man. She had loved him with all her heart when he told
her stories, and at other times she had been distinctly afraid of him.
These stories had been fairy tales to the child, but she had now
discovered that they had been history, or what passes for it.

He had told her about King Amulius of Alba Longa, and of the twin
founders of Rome, and of all the far-off times and doings, and he had
described to her six wonderful maidens who lived in a palace in the
Forum and kept a little fire burning day and night, which he compared to
the great Roman race over whose destiny the mystic ladies were always
watching. It was only quite lately that she had heard any learned men
say in earnest some of the things which he had told her with a smile as
if he were inventing a tale to amuse her child's fancy. But what he had
said had made a deep and abiding impression, and had become a part of
her thought. She sometimes dreamed very vividly that she was again a
little girl, sitting on his knee and listening to his wonderful stories.
In other ways she had not missed him much after his death. Possibly her
mother had not missed him either; for though she spoke of him
occasionally with a sort of awe, it was never with anything like
emotion.

Count Fortiguerra had been kind to the child, or it might be truer to
say that he had spoilt her by encouraging her without much judgment in
her insatiable thirst for knowledge, and in her unnecessary ambition to
excel in everything her fancy led her to attempt. Her mother, with a
good deal of social foolishness and a very pliable character, possessed
nevertheless a fair share of womanly intelligence, and knew by instinct
that a young girl who is very different from other girls, no matter how
clever she may be, rarely makes what people call a good marriage.

There is probably nothing which leads a young woman to think a man a
desirable husband so much as some exceptional gift, or even some
brilliant eccentricity, which distinguishes him from other people; but
there is nothing which frightens away the average desirable husband so
much as anything of that sort in the young lady of his affections, and
every married woman knows it very well.

The excellent Countess used to wish that her daughter would grow up more
like other girls, and in the sincere belief that a little womanly vanity
must certainly counteract a desire for super-feminine mental
cultivation, she honestly tried to interest Cecilia in such frivolities
as dress, dancing, and romantic fiction. The result was only very
partially successful. Cecilia was dressed to perfection, without seeming
to take any trouble about it, and she danced marvellously before she had
ever been to a ball; but she cared nothing for the novels she was
allowed to read, and she devoured serious books with increasing
intellectual voracity.

Her stepfather laughed, and said that the girl was a genius and ought
not to be hampered by ordinary rules; and his wife, who had at first
feared lest he should dislike the child of her first husband, was only
too glad that he should, on the contrary, show something like paternal
infatuation for Cecilia, since no children of his own were born to him.
He was a man, too, of wide reading and experience, and having
considerable political insight into his times. Before Cecilia was eleven
years old he talked to her about serious matters, as if she had been
grown up, and often wished that the child should be at table and in the
drawing-room when men who were making history came informally to the
embassy. Cecilia had listened to their talk, and had remembered a very
large part of what she had heard, understanding more and more as she
grew up; and by far the greatest sorrow of her life had been the death
of her stepfather.

She was a modern Italian girl, and her mother was a Roman who had been
brought up in something of the old strictness and narrowness, first in a
convent, and afterwards in a rather gloomy home under the shadow of the
most rigid parental authority. Exceptional gifts, exceptional
surroundings, and exceptional opportunities had made Cecilia Palladio an
exception to all types, and as unlike the average modern Italian young
girl as could be imagined.

The sun had already set as the mother and daughter drove away, but it
was still broad day, and a canopy of golden clouds, floating high over
the city, reflected rosy lights through the blue shadows in the crowded
streets. The Countess Fortiguerra was pleasantly aware that every man
under seventy turned to look after her daughter, from the smart old
colonel of cavalry in his perfect uniform to the ragged and haggard
waifs who sold wax matches at the corners of the streets. She was not in
the least jealous of her, as mothers have been before now, and perhaps
she was able to enjoy vicariously what she herself had never had, but
had often wished for, the gift of nature which instantly fixes the
attention of the other sex.

"Why did you not tell me?" asked Cecilia, after a silence that had
lasted five minutes.

The Countess pretended not to understand, coloured a little, and tried
to look surprised.

"Why did you not tell me that you and the Princess wish me to marry her
nephew?"

This was direct, and an answer was necessary. The Countess laughed
soothingly.

"Dear child!" she cried, "it is impossible to deceive you! We only
wished that you two might meet, and perhaps like each other."

"Well," answered Cecilia, "we have met."

The answer was not encouraging, and she did not seem inclined to say
more of her own accord, but her mother could not restrain a natural
curiosity.

"Yes," she said, in a conciliatory tone, "but how do you like him?"

Cecilia seemed to be hesitating for a moment.

"Very much," she answered, unexpectedly, after the pause.

The Countess was so much pleased that she coloured again. She had never
been able to hide what she felt, and she secretly envied people who
never blushed.

"I am so glad!" she said. "I was sure you would like each other."

"It does not follow that because I like him, he likes me," answered
Cecilia, quietly. "And even if he does, that is not a reason why we
should marry. I may never marry at all."

"How can you say such things!" cried the Countess, not at all satisfied.

Cecilia shrank a little in her corner of the deep phaeton and
instinctively drew the edges of her little silk mantle together over her
chest, as if to protect herself from something.

"You know," she said, almost sharply.

"I shall never understand you," her mother sighed.

"Give me time to understand myself, mother," answered the young girl,
suddenly unbending. "I am only eighteen; I have never been into the
world, and the mere idea of marrying----"

She stopped short, and her firm lips closed tightly.

"No, I do not understand," said the Countess. "The thought of marriage
was never disagreeable to me, even when I was quite young. It is the
natural object of a woman's life."

"There are exceptions, surely! There are nuns, for instance."

"Oh, if you wish to go into a convent----"

"I have no religious vocation," Cecilia answered gravely. "Or if I have,
it is not of that sort."

"I am glad to hear it!" The Countess was beginning to lose her temper.
"If you thought you had, you would be quite capable of taking the veil."

"Yes," the young girl replied. "If I wished to be a nun, and if I were
sure that I should be a good nun, I would enter a convent at once. But I
am not naturally devout, I suppose."

"In my time," said the Countess, with emphasis, "when young girls did
not take the veil, they married."

As an argument, this was weak and lacked logic, and Cecilia felt rather
pitiless just then.

"There are only two possible ways of living," she said; "either by
religion, if you have any, and that is the easier, or by rule."

"And pray what sort of rule can there be to take the place of religion?"

"Act so that the reason for your actions may be considered a universal
law."

"That is nonsense!" cried the Countess.

"No," replied Cecilia, unmoved, "it is Kant's Categorical Imperative."

"It makes no difference," retorted her mother. "It is nonsense."

Cecilia said nothing, and her expression did not change, for she knew
that her mother could not understand her, and she was not at all sure
that she understood herself, as she had almost confessed. Seeing that
she did not answer, the excellent Countess took the opportunity of
telling her that her head had been turned by too much reading, though it
was all her poor, dear stepfather's fault, since he had filled her head
with ideas. What she meant by "ideas" was not clear, except that they
were of course dangerous in themselves and utterly subversive of social
order, and that the main purpose of all education should be to
discourage them in the young.

"They should be left to old people," she concluded; "they have nothing
else to think of."

Cecilia had heard very little, being absorbed in her own reflections,
but as her mother often spoke in the same way, the general drift of what
she had said was unmistakable. The two were very unlike, but they were
not unloving. In her heart the Countess took the most unbounded pride in
her only child's beauty and cleverness, except when the latter opposed
itself to her social inclinations and ambitions; and the young girl
really loved her mother when not irritated by some speech or action that
offended her taste. That her mother should not always understand her
seemed quite natural.

They had almost reached their door, the great pillared porch of the
mysterious Palazzo Massimo, in which they had an apartment, for they did
not live in the villa where the garden party was to be given. Cecilia's
gloved hand went out quietly to the Countess's and gently pressed it.

"Let me think my own thoughts, mother," she said; "they shall never hurt
you."

"Yes, dear, of course," answered the elder woman meekly, her little
burst of temper having already subsided.

Cecilia left her early that evening and went to her own room to be
alone. It was not that she was tired, nor painfully affected by a
strange sensation she had felt during the afternoon; but she realised
that she had reached the end of the first stage in life, and that
another was going to begin, and it was part of her nature to seek for a
complete understanding of everything in her existence. It seemed to her
unworthy of a thinking being to act or to feel, without clearly defining
the cause of every feeling and action. Youth dreams of an impossible
completeness in carrying out its self-set rules of perfection, and is
swayed and stunned, and often paralysed, when they are broken to pieces
by rebellious human nature.

The room was very large and dim, for Cecilia had put out the electric
light, and had lit two big wax candles, of the sort that are burned in
churches. The blinds and shutters of the windows were open, and the
moonlight fell in two broad floods upon the pale carpet, half across the
floor. The white bed with its high canopy of lace looked ghostly against
the furthest wall, like a marble sepulchre under a mist. The light blue
damask on the walls was dark in the gloom, and there was not much
furniture to break the long surfaces. The dusky air was cool and pure,
for Cecilia detested perfumes of all sorts.

She sat motionless in a high carved seat, just in the moonlight, one
hand upon an arm of the chair, the other on her breast. She had gathered
her hair into a knot, low at the back of her head, and the folds of a
soft white robe just followed the outlines of her figure. The table on
which the candles stood was a little behind her, and away from the
window, and the still yellow light only touched her hair in one or two
places, sending back dull golden reflections.

The strange young face was very quiet, and even the lids rarely moved as
she steadily stared into the shadow. There was no look of thought, nor
any visible effort of concentration in her features; there was rather an
air of patient waiting, of perfect readiness to receive whatever should
come to her out of the depths. So, a beautiful marble face on a tomb
gazes into the shadows of a dim church, and gazes on, and waits, neither
growing nor changing, neither satisfied nor disappointed, but calm and
enduring, as if expecting the resurrection of the dead and the life of
the world to come. But for the rare drooping of the lids, that rested
her sight, the girl would have seemed to be in a trance; she was in a
state of almost perfect contemplation that approached to perfect
happiness, since she was hardly conscious that her strongest wishes were
still unsatisfied.

She had been in the same state before now--last week, last month, last
year, and again and again, as it seemed to her, very long ago; so long,
that the time seemed like ages, and the intervals like centuries, until
it all disappeared altogether in the immeasurable, and the past, the
present, and the future were around her at once, unbroken, always
ending, yet always beginning again. In the midst floated the soul, the
self, the undying individuality, a light that shot out long rays, like a
star, towards the ever present moments in an ever recurring life of
which she had been, and was, and was to be, most keenly conscious.

So far, the truth, perhaps; the truth, guessed by the mystics of all
ages, sometimes hidden in secret writings, sometimes proclaimed to the
light in symbols too plain to be understood, now veiled in the reasoned
propositions of philosophers, now sung in sublime verse by inspired
seers; present, as truth always is, to the few, misunderstood, as all
truths are, by the many.

But beside the truth, and outshining it, came the illusion, clear and
bright, and appealing to the heart with the music of all the changes
that are illusion's life. Sitting very still in the moonlight, Cecilia
saw pictures in the shadow, and herself walking in the mazes of many
dreams; and she watched them, till even her eyelids no longer drooped
from time to time, and her breathing ceased to stir the folds of white
upon her bosom.

Even then, she knew that she herself was not dreaming, but was calling
up dreams which she saw, which could be nothing but visions after all,
and would end in a darkness beyond which she could see nothing, and in
which she would feel real physical pain, that would be almost
unbearable, though she knew that she would gladly bear it again and
again, for the sake of again seeing the phantasms of herself drawn in
mystic light upon the shadow.

They came and followed one upon another, like days of life. There was
the beautiful marble court with its deep portico, its pillars, and its
overhanging upper story, all gleaming in the low morning sun; she could
hear the water softly laughing its way through the square marble-edged
basins, level with the ground, she could smell the spring violets that
grew in the neatly trimmed borders, she knew the faces of the statues
that stood between the columns, and smiled at her. She knew herself,
young, golden-haired, all in white, a little pale from the night's vigil
before the eternal fire, just entering the court as she came back from
the temple, and then standing quite still for a moment, facing the
morning sun and drinking in long draughts of the sweet spring air. From
far above, the matin song of birds came down out of the gardens of
Cæsar's palace, and high over the court the sounds of the Forum began to
ring and echo, as they did all day and half the night.

It was herself, her very self, that was there, resting one hand upon a
fluted column and looking upwards, her eyes, her face, her figure, real
and unchanged after ages, as they were hers now; and in her look there
was the infinite longing, the readiness to receive, which she felt still
and must feel always, to the end of time.

Now, the dream would move on, slowly and full of details. The lithe
dream figure would rest in the small white room at the upper end of the
court, and resting, would dream dreams within that dream; and, looking
on, she herself would know what they were. They would be full of a deep
desire to be free for ever from earth and body and life, joined for all
eternity with something pure and high that could not be seen, but of
which her soul was a part, mingled with the changing things for a time,
but to be withdrawn from them again, maiden and spotless as it had come
amongst them, a true and perfect Vestal.

The precious treasures in the secret places of the little temple would
pass away, the rudely carved wooden image of Pallas would crumble to
dust, the shields that had come down from heaven would fall to pieces in
green corrosion, the sacred vessels would be broken or come to a base
use, the fire would go out and Vesta's hearth would be cold for ever.

At the mere thought, the sleeping face in the vision would tremble and
grow pale for a moment, but soon would smile again, for the fire had
been faithfully tended all the night long.

But it would all pass away, even the place, even Rome herself, and in
the sphere of divine joy the sleeper would forget even to dream, and
would be quite at rest, until the mid-hour of day, when a companion
would come softly to the door and wake her with gentle words and kindly
touch, to join the other Vestals at the thrice-purified table in the
cool hall.

So the warm hours would pass, and later, if she chose, the holy maiden
might go out into the city, whithersoever she would, borne in a high,
open litter by many slaves, with a stern lictor walking before her, and
the people would fall back on either side. If she chanced to meet one of
the Prætors, or even the Consul himself, their guards would salute her
as no sovereign would be saluted in Rome; and should she see some
wretched thieving slave being led to death on the cross upon the
Esquiline, her slightest word could reverse all his condemnation, and
blot out all his crimes. For she was sacred to the Goddess, and above
Consuls and Prætors and judges. But none of those things would touch her
heart nor please her vanity, for all her pure young soul was bent on
freedom from this earth, divine and eternal, as the end of a sinless
life.

The eyes in the dream, the eyes of the girl who stood by the column,
drinking the morning air, had never met the eyes of a man with the wish
that a glance might linger to a look. But she who watched the dream knew
that the time was at hand, and that the dark cloud of fear was already
gathering which was to darken her sun and break by and by in an unknown
fear. She knew it, she, the waking Cecilia Palladio; but the other
Cecilia, the Vestal of long ago, guessed nothing of the future, and
stood there breathing softly, already refreshed after the night's
watching. It would all happen, as it always happened, little by little,
detail after detail, till the dreaded moment.

But it did not. The dream changed. Instead of crossing the marble court,
and lingering a moment by the water, the Vestal stood by the column,
against the background of shade cast by the portico. She was listening
now, she was expecting some one, she was glancing anxiously about as if
to see whether any one were there; but she was alone.

Then it came, in the shadow behind her, the face of a man, moving
nearer--a rugged Roman head, with deep-set, bold blue eye, big brows, a
great jaw, reddish hair. It came nearer, and the girl knew it was
coming. In an instant more, she would spring forward across the court,
crying out for protection.

No, she did not move till the man was close to her, looking over her
shoulder, whispering in her ear. Cecilia saw it all, and it was so real
that she tried to call out, to shriek, to make any sound that could save
her image from destruction, for the kiss that was coming would be death
to both, and death with unutterable shame and pain. But her voice was
gone, and her lips were frozen. She sat paralysed with a horror she had
never known before, while the face of the phantom girl blushed softly,
and turned to the strong man, and the two gazed into each other's eyes a
moment, knowing that they loved.

She felt that it was her other self, and that she had the will to
resist, even then, and that the will must still be supreme over the
illusion. Never, it seemed to her, had she made such a supreme effort,
never had she felt such power concentrated in her strong determination,
never in all her life had she been so sure of the result when she had
willed anything with all her might. Every fibre of her being, every
nerve in her body, every throbbing cell of her brain was strained to
breaking. The two faces were quite close, the longing lips had almost
met--nothing could hinder, nothing could save; the phantasms did not
know that she was watching them.

Suddenly something changed. She no longer saw herself in a vision, she
was herself there, somewhere, in the dark, in the light--she did not
know--and there was no will, nor thought, nor straining resistance any
more, for Lamberto Lamberti held her in his arms, her, Cecilia Palladio,
her very living self, and his lips were upon hers, and she loved him
beyond death, or life, or fear, or torment. Surely she was dying then,
for the darkness was whirling with her, spinning itself into myriads of
circles of fiery stars, tearing her over the brink of the world to
eternity beyond.

One second more and it must have ended so. Instead, she was leaning back
in her chair, between the moonlight and the steadily burning candles, in
her own room, alone. From head to foot she trembled, and now and then
drew a short and gasping breath. Her parted lips were moist and very
cold. She touched them, and they felt like flowers at night, wet with
dew. She pushed the hair from her forehead, and her brow was strangely
damp.

She sprang to her feet with a cry of terror, and stared at the door, for
she was quite sure that she had heard it close softly. It was a heavy
door, that turned noiselessly on its hinges and fitted perfectly, and
she knew the soft click of the well-made French lock when the spring
quietly pushed the bevelled latch-bolt into the socket. In an instant
she had crossed the room and had turned the handle to draw it in. But
the door was locked, beyond all doubt--she had turned the key before she
had sat down in the chair. She felt intensely cold, and an icy wave
seemed to lift her hair from her forehead. Her hand instinctively found
the white button, close beside the door-frame, which controlled all the
electric lamps, and pushed it in, and the room was flooded with light.
She must have imagined that she had heard the sound that had frightened
her.

Half dazed, she moved slowly to the windows, and closed the inner
shutters, one by one, shutting out the cold moonlight, then stood by the
chair a moment, looked at it, and glanced in the direction whence the
vision had come to her out of the shadow.

She did not know how it happened, but presently she was lying on her
bed, her face buried in the pillows, and she was tearing her heart out
in a tearless storm of shame and self-contempt.

What right had that man whom she had so often seen in her dreams to be
alive in the real world, walking among other men, recognising her, as
she had felt that he did that very afternoon? What right had he to come
to her again in the vision and to change it all, to take her in his
violent arms and kiss her on the mouth, and burn the mark of shame into
her soul, and fill her with a pleasure more horrible than any pain? Was
this the end of all her girlish meditation, of the Vestal's longing for
higher things, of the mystic's perfect way? A man's brutal kiss not even
resisted? Was that all? It could not have been worse if on that same day
she had been alone with him in the garden, instead of with Guido d'Este,
and if he had suddenly put his arms round her, and if she had not even
turned her face from his.

It was only a dream. Yes, to-morrow she would awake, if she slept at
all, and the sunshine would be streaming in where the moonlight had
shone, and it would only be a dream, past and to be forgotten. Perhaps.
But what were dreams, then? She had not been asleep, she was quite sure.
There was not even that poor excuse. The man's phantasm had come to her
awake.

And Lamberto Lamberti was nothing to her. Beyond the startling
recognition of a face long familiar, but never seen among the living, he
was to her a man she had met but once, and did not wish to meet again.
She had been aware of his presence near her at the Princess's, and when
he had gone away she had looked at him once more with a sort of wonder;
but she had felt nothing else, she had not touched his hand, the thought
that he would ever dare to seize her roughly in his arms brought burning
blushes to her cheek and outraged all her maiden senses. She had never
seen any man whom she could suffer to touch her; her whole nature
revolted at the thought. Yet, just now, there had been neither revolt
nor resistance; she felt that she had been herself, awake, alive, and
consenting to an unknown but frightfully real contamination, from which
her soul could never again be wholly clean.

The storm subsided, and sullen waves of self-contempt swelled and sank,
as if to overwhelm her drowning soul. She understood at last the
ascetic's wrath against the mortal body and his irresistible craving for
bodily pain.




                               CHAPTER IV


Very early in the morning Cecilia fell into a dreamless sleep at last,
and awoke, unrefreshed, after nine o'clock. She felt very tired and
listless as she opened the window a little and let in the light and air,
with the sounds of the busy thoroughfare below. The weather was suddenly
much warmer, and her head was heavy.

It had all been a dream, no doubt, and was gone where dreams go; but it
had been like a fight, out of which she had come alive by a miracle,
bruised and wounded, and offended in her whole being. Never again would
she sit alone at night and look for her image in the shadow, since such
things could come of playing with visions; and she trusted that she
might never again set eyes upon Lamberto Lamberti. She was alone, but at
the thought of meeting him she blushed and bit her lip angrily. How was
it possible that he should know what she had dreamt? For years, in that
dream of the Vestal, a being had played a part, a being too like him in
face to be another man, but who had loved her as a goddess, and whom she
had loved for his matchless bravery and his glorious strength over
himself. It was a long story, that had gradually grown clear in every
detail, that had gone far beyond death to a spiritual life in a place of
light, though it had always ended in something vaguely fearful that
brought her back to the world, and to her present living self, to begin
again. She could not go over it now, but she was conscious, and to her
shame, that the spell of perfect happiness had always been broken at
last by the taint of earthly longing and regret that crept up stealthily
from the world below, an evil mist, laden with poison and fever and
mortality.

That change had been undefined, though it had been horrible and
irresistible; it had been evil, but it had not been brutal, and it had
thrilled her with the certainty of passion and pain to come, realising
neither while dreading and loving both.

She had read the writings of men who believe that by long meditation and
practised intention the real self of man or woman can be separated from
all that darkens it, though not easily, because it is bound up with
fragments, as it were, of the selves of others, with all the
inheritances of a hundred generations of good and bad, with sleeping
instincts and passions any of which may suddenly spring up and overwhelm
the rest. She had also read that the real self, when found at last,
might be far better and purer than the mixed self of every day, which
each of us knows and counts upon; but that it might also be much worse,
much coarser, much more violent, when freed from every other influence,
and that coming upon it unawares and unprepared, men had lost their
reason altogether beyond recovery.

She asked herself now whether this was what had happened to her, and no
answer came; there was only the very weary blank of a great uncertainty,
in which anything might be, or in which there might be nothing; and
then, there was the vivid burning fear of meeting Lamberto Lamberti face
to face. That was by far the strongest and most clearly defined of her
sensations.

If the Princess Anatolie could have known what Cecilia felt that
morning, she would have been exceedingly well pleased, and Cecilia's own
mother would have considered that this was a case in which the powers of
evil had been permitted to work for the accomplishment of a good end.
Nothing could have distressed the excellent Countess more than that her
daughter should accidentally fall in love with Lamberti, who was a
younger son in a numerous family, with no prospects beyond those offered
by his profession. Nothing could have interfered more directly with the
Princess's sensible intentions for her nephew. Perhaps nothing could
have caused greater surprise to Lamberti himself. On the other hand,
Guido d'Este would have been glad, but not surprised. He rarely was.

In the course of the day he left a card at the Palazzo Massimo for the
Countess Fortiguerra, and as he turned away he regretted that he could
not ask for her, and see her, and possibly see her daughter also. That
was evidently out of the question as yet, according to his social laws,
but his regret was real. It was long since any woman's face had left him
more than a vague impression of good looks, or dulness, but he had
thought a good deal about Cecilia Palladio since he had met her, and he
knew that he wished to talk with her again, however much he might resent
the idea that he was meant to marry her. She was the first young girl he
had ever known who had not bored him with platitudes or made
conversation impossible by obstinate silence.

It was true that he had not talked with her much, and at first it had
seemed hard to talk at all, but the ice had been broken suddenly, and
for a few minutes he had found it easy. As for the chilling coldness of
her last words, he could account for that easily enough. Like himself,
she had seen that a marriage had been planned for her without her
knowledge, and, like him, she had resented the trap. For a while she had
forgotten, as he had done, but had remembered suddenly when they were
about to part. She had meant to show him plainly that she had not had
any voice in the matter, and he liked her the better for it, now that he
understood her meaning.

She was like the Psyche, he thought, and it occurred to him that he
could buy a cast of the statue. He had always thought it beautiful. He
strolled through narrow streets in the late afternoon till he came to
the shop of a dealer in casts, of whom he had once bought something, and
he went in. The man had what he wanted, and he examined it carefully.

She was not like the Psyche after all, and the crude white plaster
shocked his taste for the first time. If the marble original had been in
Rome, instead of in Naples, he could have gone to see it. He left the
shop disappointed, and walked slowly towards the Farnese palace. The day
seemed endless, and there was no particular reason why all days should
not seem as long. There was nothing to do; nothing amused him, and
nobody asked anything of him. It would be very strange and pleasant to
be of use in the world.

He went home and sat down by the open window that looked across the
Tiber. The wide room was flooded with the evening light, and warm with
much colour that lingered and floated about beautiful objects here and
there. It was not a very luxuriously furnished room, but it was not the
habitation of an ascetic or puritanical man either. Guido cared more for
rare engravings and etchings than for pictures, and a few very fine
framed prints stood on the big writing table; there was Dürer's
Melancholia, and the Saint Jerome, and the Little White Horse, and the
small Saint Anthony, and Rembrandt's Three Trees, all by itself, as the
most wonderful etching in the world deserved to be; and here and there,
about the room, were a few good engravings by Martin Schöngauer, and by
Mantegna, and by Marcantonio Raimondi. The bold, careless, effective
drawing of the Italian engravers contrasted strongly with the profoundly
conscientious work of Schöngauer and Lucas van Leyden, and revealed at a
glance the incomparable mastery of Dürer's dry point and Rembrandt's
etching needle, the deep conviction of the German, and the inexhaustible
richness of the Dutchman's imagination.

A picture hung over the fireplace, the picture of a woman, at half
length and a little smaller than life, holding in exquisite hands a
small covered vessel of silver encrusted with gold, and gazing out into
the warm light with the gentlest hazel eyes. A veil of olive green
covered her head, but the fair hair found its way out, tresses and
ringlets, on each side of the face. The woman was perhaps a Magdalen,
not like any other Magdalen in all the paintings of the world, and more
the great lady of the castle of Magdalon, she of the Golden Legend. When
Andrea del Sarto painted that face, he meant something that he never
told, and it pleased Guido d'Este to try and guess the secret. As he
glanced at the canvas, glowing in the rich light, it struck him that
perhaps Cecilia Palladio was more like the woman in the picture than she
was like the Psyche. Then he almost laughed, and turned away, for he
realised that he was thinking of the girl continually, and saw her face
everywhere.

He turned away impatiently, in spite of the smile. He was annoyed by the
attraction he felt towards Cecilia, because the thought of marrying an
heiress, in order that his aunt might recover money she had literally
thrown away, was grossly repulsive; and also, no doubt, because he was
not docile, though he was good-natured, and he hated to have anything in
his life planned for him by others. He was still less pleased now that
he found himself searching for reasons which should justify him in
marrying Cecilia in spite of all this. Nothing irritates a man more than
his own inborn inconsistency, whereas he enjoys diabolical satisfaction
in convicting any woman of the same fault.

After all, said his Inclination, as if coolly arguing the case, if poor
men were only to marry poor girls, and rich men rich ones, something
unnatural would happen to the distribution of wealth, which was
undesirable for the future of society. Of course, a rich man might marry
a poor girl if he chose. That was done, and the men who did it got an
extraordinary amount of credit for being disinterested, unless they were
laughed at for falling in love with a pretty face. If anything could
prove the hopeless inequality of woman with man, it would be that! No
one thought much the worse of a penniless girl who married for money,
whereas a starving dandy who did the same thing immediately became an
object of derision.

But then, added the Inclination, with subtlety, the opinions of society
were entirely manufactured by women for their own advantage, and that
was an excellent reason for not caring what society thought. The
all-powerful, impersonal "they," of whom we only know what "they say,"
what "they wear," and what "they pretend," are feminine and plural; they
rule all that region of the world within which women do not work with
their hands, and are therefore at full liberty to exercise those gifts
of intelligence which it has pleased Providence to bestow upon them so
plentifully. They do so to some purpose.

Surely, argued Inclination, it was not very dignified of Guido to care
much, and to care beforehand, for the opinions of a pack of women,
supposing that he should come to like Cecilia enough to wish to marry
her for her own sake. And besides, though he was poor, he was not
uncomfortably so. Poverty meant not having horses and carriages, nor a
yacht, and living in bachelor's rooms, and not giving dinner parties,
and not playing cards, and not giving every woman whatever she fancied,
if it happened to be a pearl or a pigeon's blood ruby. That was poverty,
of course, but it was relative.

If his aunt did not drive him to blow out his brains in a fit of
impatience, there was no reason why Guido should not go on living, as he
lived now, to the far end of a long and sufficiently well-fed life. And
if he married Cecilia and her fortune, it would certainly not be because
he wished to give other women rubies and pearls, nor for the sake of
keeping a couple of hunters, two or three carriages, and a coach; still
less, because he could ever wish to lose money again at baccara, or
poker, or bridge. He had done all those things, and they had not amused
him long. If he ever married Cecilia, it would be because he fell in
love with her, which, thank goodness, had not happened yet. Inclination
was quite sure of that, but was willing to admit the possibility in the
future, merely for the sake of argument.

Before it was time to dress for dinner that evening, Guido received a
long letter from his aunt, written with her own hand, which probably
meant that Monsieur Leroy knew little or nothing of its contents. Guido
glanced at the pages, one after another, and saw that the whole letter
was in the writer's most affectionate manner. Then he read it carefully.
It had been so kind of him to be civil to her friends on the previous
day, said the Princess. He reminded her of his poor father, her dear
brother, who, in all his many misfortunes, had never once lost his
beautiful affability of temper and unfailing courtesy to every one about
him.

This was very pretty, but Guido had heard that his father's beautiful
affability had sometimes been ruffled so far as to allow a certain
harmless violence, such as hurling a light chair at the head of a
faithful courtier and friend who gave him advice that was too good to be
taken, or summarily boxing the ears of his son and heir when the latter
was already over thirty years old.

Guido sometimes wondered why he had not inherited some of that very
unroyal temper, which must have been such a thoroughly satisfactory
relief to the ex-king's feelings. He never felt the least desire to
dance with rage and throw the furniture about the room.

His aunt's letter was evidently meant to please him and flatter his
vanity, and she did not once refer to matters of business. She asked his
opinion about a new novel he had not read yet, and had he thought of
leaving a card on the Countess Fortiguerra? She lived in the Palazzo
Massimo. What a strange girl the daughter was, to be sure! so very
unlike other girls that it was almost disquieting to talk with her. Of
course there was nothing real behind all that superficial talk about
lectures at the Sorbonne, and Nietzsche, and all that. Everybody
pretended to have read Nietzsche nowadays, and after all the girl might
be quite sensible. One could not help wondering what she would make of
her life, with her handsome fortune, and her odd ideas, and no one to
look after her except that dear, gentle, sweet-tempered, foolish mother,
who was in perpetual adoration before her! It would be a brave man who
would marry such a girl, the Princess wrote, in spite of her money; but
there was this to be said, he would not have any trouble with his
mother-in-law.

Subtle, very subtle of the Princess, who left the subject there and
ended her letter by asking a favour of Guido. It was indeed only for the
sake of asking it, she explained, that she was writing to him at all.
Would he allow a great friend of hers to see his Andrea del Sarto? It
was the celebrated art critic, Doctor Baumgarten, of whom he had heard.
Leroy would bring him the next morning about ten o'clock, if Guido had
no objection. He need not answer; he must not take any trouble about the
matter. If he had an engagement at ten, perhaps he would leave orders
that the Doctor should be allowed to see the picture.

Guido did not think at once of any good reason for refusing such a
request. He was very fond of his Andrea del Sarto; indeed, he liked it
much better than a small Raphael of undoubted authenticity which was
hung in another part of the room. The German critic was quite welcome to
see both, and perhaps knew something about prints which might be worth
learning. He was probably writing a book. Germans were always writing
books. Guido wrote a line to thank his aunt for her letter, and to say
that her friend would be welcome at the appointed hour.

He was sealing the note when the door opened and Lamberto Lamberti came
in.

"Will you come and dine with me?" he asked, standing still before the
writing table.

"Let us dine here," answered Guido, without looking up, and examining
the little seal he had made on the envelope. "I daresay there is
something to eat." He held out the note to his servant, who stood in the
open doorway. "Send this at once," he said.

"Yes," said Lamberti, answering the invitation. "I do not care whether
there is anything to eat or not, and it is always quiet here."

"What is the matter?" asked Guido, looking at him attentively for the
first time since he had entered. "Yes," he added to his man, "Signor
Lamberti will dine with me."

The servant disappeared and shut the door. Guido repeated his question,
but Lamberti only shook his head carelessly and relit his half-smoked
cigar. Guido watched him. He was less red than usual, and his eyes
glittered in the light of the wax match. His voice had sounded sharp and
metallic, as Guido had never heard it before.

When two men are intimate friends and really trust each other they do
not overwhelm one another with questions. Each knows that each will
speak when he is ready, or needs help or sympathy.

"I have just been answering a very balmy letter from my aunt," Guido
said, rising from the table. "Sweeter than honey in the honeycomb! Read
it. It has a distinctly literary and biographical turn. The allusion to
my father's gentle disposition is touching."

Lamberti looked through the letter carelessly, dropped it on the table,
and sucked hard at his cigar.

"What did you expect?" he asked, between two puffs. "For the present you
are the apple of her eye. She will handle you as tenderly as a new-laid
egg, until she gets what she wants!"

Lamberti's similes lacked sequence, but not character.

"The Romans," observed Guido, "began with the egg and ended with the
apple. I have an idea that we are going to do the same thing at dinner,
and that there will be nothing between. But we can smoke between the
courses."

"Yes," answered Lamberti, who had not heard a word. "I daresay."

Guido looked at him again, rather furtively. Lamberti never drank and
had iron nerves, but he was visibly disturbed. He was what people
vaguely call "not quite himself."

Guido went to the door of his bedroom.

"Where are you going?" asked Lamberti, sharply.

"I am going to wash my hands before dinner," Guido answered with a
smile. "Do you want to wash yours?"

"No, thank you. I have just dressed."

He turned his back and went to the open window as Guido left the room.
In a few seconds his cigar had gone out again, and he was leaning on the
sill with both hands, staring at the twilight sky in the west. The
colours had all faded away to the almost neutral tint of straw-tempered
steel.

The outline of the Janiculum stood out sharp and black in an uneven
line. Below, there were the scattered lights of Trastevere, the flowing
river, and the silence of the deserted Via Giulia. Lamberti looked
steadily out, biting his extinguished cigar, and his features contracted
as if he were in pain.

He had come to his friend instinctively, as his friend would have come
to him, meaning to tell him what had happened. But he hesitated.
Besides, it might all have been only his imagination; in part it could
have been nothing else, and the rest was a mere coincidence. But he had
never been an imaginative man, and it was strange that he should be so
much affected by a mere illusion.

He started and turned suddenly, sure that some one was close behind him.
But there was no one, and a moment later Guido came back. Anxious not to
annoy his friend by anything like curiosity, he made a pretence of
setting his writing table in order, turned one of the lamps down a
little--he hated electric light--and then looked at the picture over the
fireplace.

"Did you ever hear of that Baumgarten, the German art critic?" he asked,
without turning round.

"Baumgarten--let me see! I fancy I have seen the name to-day." Lamberti
tried to concentrate his attention.

"You just read it in my aunt's letter," Guido answered. "You
remember--she asks if he may come to-morrow. I wonder why."

"To value your property, of course," replied Lamberti, roughly.

"Do you think so?" Guido did not seem at all surprised. "I daresay. She
is quite capable of it. She is welcome to everything I possess if she
will only leave me in peace. But just now, when she has evidently made
up her mind to marry me to this new heiress, it does not seem likely
that she would take trouble to find out what my pictures are worth, does
it?"

"It all depends on what she thinks of the chances that you will marry or
not."

"What do you think of them, yourself?" asked Guido, idly.

He was glad of anything to talk about while Lamberti was in his present
mood.

"What a question!" exclaimed the latter. "How should I know whether you
are going to fall in love with the girl or not?"

"I am half afraid I am," said Guido, thoughtfully.

His man announced dinner, and the two friends crossed the hall to the
little dining room, and sat down under the soft light of the
old-fashioned olive-oil lamp that hung from the ceiling. Everything on
the table was old, worn, and spotless. The silver was all of the style
of the first Empire, with an interlaced monogram surmounted by a royal
crown. The same device was painted in gold in the middle of the plain
white plates, which were more or less chipped at the edges. The glasses
and decanters were of that heavy cut glass, ornamented with gold lines,
which used to be made in Venice in the eighteenth century. Some of them
were chipped, too, like the plates. It had never occurred to Guido to
put the whole service away as a somewhat valuable collection, though he
sometimes thought that it was growing shabby. But he liked the old
things which had come to him from the ex-king, part of the furniture of
a small shooting box that had been left to him, and which he had sold to
an Austrian Archduke.

Lamberti took a little soup and swallowed half a glass of white wine.

"I had an odd dream last night," he said, "and I have had a little
adventure to-day. I will tell you by-and-by."

"Just as you like," Guido answered. "I hope the adventure was not an
accident--you look as if you had been badly shaken."

"Yes. I did not know that I could be so nervous. You see, I do not often
dream. I generally go to sleep when I lay my head upon the pillow and
wake when I have slept seven hours. At sea, I always have to be called
when it is my watch. Yes, I have solid nerves. But last night----"

He stopped, as the man entered, bringing a dish.

"Well?" enquired Guido, who did not suppose that Lamberti could have any
reason for not telling his dream in the presence of the servant.

Lamberti hesitated a moment, and helped himself before he answered.

"Do you believe in dreams?" he asked.

"What do you mean? Do I believe that dreams come true? No. When they do,
it is a coincidence."

"Yes. I suppose so. But this is rather more than a coincidence. I do not
understand it at all. After all, I am a perfectly healthy man. It never
occurred to you that my mind might be unbalanced, did it?"

Guido looked at the rugged Roman head, the muscular throat, the broad
shoulders.

"No," he answered. "It certainly never occurred to me."

"Nor to me either," said Lamberti, and he ate slowly and thoughtfully.

"My friend," observed Guido, "you are just a little enigmatical this
evening."

"Not at all, not at all! I tell you that my nerves are good. You know
something about archæology, do you not?"

The apparently irrelevant question came after a short pause.

"Not much," Guido answered, supposing that Lamberti wished to change the
subject on account of the servant. "What do you want to know?"

"Nothing," said Lamberti. "The question is, whether what I dreamt last
night was all imagination or whether it was a memory of something I once
knew and had forgotten."

"What did you dream?" Guido sipped his wine and leaned back to listen,
hoping that his friend was going to speak out at last.

"Was the temple of Vesta in the Forum?" enquired Lamberti.

"Certainly."

"But why did they always say that it was the round one in front of Santa
Maria in Cosmedin? I have an old bronze inkstand that is a model of it.
My mother used to tell me it was the temple of Vesta."

"People thought it was--thirty years ago. There is nothing left of the
temple but the round mass of masonry on which it stood. It is between
the Fountain of Juturna and the house of the Vestals. I have Signor
Boni's plans of it. Should you like to see them?"

"Yes--presently," answered Lamberti, with more eagerness than Guido had
expected. "Is there anything like a reconstruction of the temple or of
the house--a picture of one, I mean?"

"I think so," said Guido. "I am sure there is Baldassare Peruzzi's
sketch of the temple, as it was in his day."

"I dreamt that I saw it last night, the temple and the house, and all
the Forum besides, and not in ruins either, but just as everything was
in old times. Could the Vestals' house have had an upper story? Is that
possible?"

"The archæologists are sure that it had," answered Guido, becoming more
interested. "Do you mean to say that you dreamt you saw it with an upper
story?"

"Yes. And the temple was something like the one they used to call
Vesta's, only it was more ornamented, and the columns seemed very near
together. The round wall, just within the columns, was decorated with
curious designs in low relief--something like a wheel, and scallops, and
curved lines. It is hard to describe, but I can see it all now."

Guido rose from his seat quickly.

"I will get the number that has the drawing in it," he said, explaining.

During the few moments that passed while he was out of the room Lamberti
sat staring at his empty place as fixedly as he had stared at the dark
line of the Janiculum a few minutes earlier. The man-servant, who had
been with him at sea, watched him with a sort of grave sympathy that is
peculiarly Italian. Then, as if an idea of great value had struck him,
he changed Lamberti's plate, poured some red wine into the tumbler, and
filled it up with water. Then he retired and watched to see whether his
old master would drink. But Lamberti did not move.

"Here it is," said Guido, entering the room with a large yellow-covered
pamphlet open in his hands. "Was it like this?"

As he asked the question he laid the pamphlet on the clean plate before
his friend. The pages were opened at Baldassare Peruzzi's rough
pen-and-ink sketch of the temple of Vesta; and as Lamberti looked at it,
his lids slowly contracted, and his features took an expression of
mingled curiosity and interest.

"The man who drew that had seen what I saw," he said at last. "Did he
draw it from some description?"

"He drew it on the spot," answered Guido. "The temple was standing then.
But as for your dream, it is quite possible that you may have seen this
same drawing in a shop window at Spithoever's or Loescher's, for
instance, without noticing it, and that the picture seemed quite new to
you when you dreamt it. That is a simple explanation."

"Very," said Lamberti. "But I saw the whole Forum."

"There are big engravings of imaginary reconstructions of the Forum, in
the booksellers' windows."

"With the people walking about? The two young priests standing in the
morning sun on the steps of the temple of Castor and Pollux? The dirty
market woman trudging past the corner of the Vestals' house with a
basket of vegetables on her head? The door slave sweeping the threshold
of the Regia with a green broom?"

"I thought you knew nothing about the Forum," said Guido, curiously.
"How do you come to know of the Regia?"

"Did I say Regia? I daresay--the name came to my lips."

"Somebody has hypnotised you," said Guido. "You are repeating things you
have heard in your sleep."

"No. I am describing things I saw in my sleep. Am I the sort of man who
is easily hypnotised? I have let men try it once or twice. We were all
interested in hypnotism on my last ship, and the surgeon made some
curious experiments with a lad who went to sleep easily. But last night
I was at home, alone, in my own room, in bed, and I dreamt."

Guido shrugged his shoulders a little indifferently.

"There must be some explanation," he said. "What else did you dream?"

Lamberti's lids drooped as if he were concentrating his attention on the
remembered vision.

"I dreamt," he said, "that I saw a veiled woman in white come out of the
temple door straight into the sunlight, and though I could not see the
face, I knew who she was. She went down the steps and then up the others
to the house of the Vestals, and entered in without looking back. I
followed her. The door was open, and there was no one to stop me."

"That is very improbable," observed Guido. "There must have always been
a slave at the door."

"I went in," continued Lamberti without heeding the interruption, "and
she was standing beside one of the pillars, a little way from the door.
She had one hand on the column, and she was facing the sun; her veil was
thrown back and the light shone through her hair. I came nearer, very
softly. She knew that I was there and was not afraid. When I was close
to her she turned her face to mine. Then I took her in my arms and
kissed her, and she did not resist."

Guido smiled gravely.

"And she turned out to be some one you know in real life, I suppose," he
said.

"Yes," answered Lamberti. "Some one I know--slightly."

"Beautiful, of course. Fair or dark?"

"You need not try to guess," Lamberti said. "I shall not tell you. My
head went round, and I woke."

"Very well. But is it this absurd dream that has made you so nervous?"

"No. Something happened to me to-day."

Lamberti ate a few mouthfuls in silence, before he went on.

"I daresay I might have invented some explanation of the dream," he said
at last. "But it only made me want to see the place. I never cared for
those things, you know. I had never gone down into the Forum in my
life--why should I? I went there this morning."

"And you could not find anything of what you had seen, of course."

"I took one of those guides who hang about the entrance waiting for
foreigners. He showed me where the temple had been, and the house, and
the temple of Castor and Pollux. I did not believe him implicitly, but
the ruins were in the right places. Then I walked up a bridge of boards
to the house of the Vestals, and went in."

"But there was no lady."

"On the contrary," said Lamberti, and his eyes glittered oddly, "the
lady was there."

"The same one whom you had seen in your dream?"

"The same. She was standing facing the sun, for it was still early, and
one of her hands was resting against the brick pillar, just as it had
rested against the column."

"That is certainly very extraordinary," said Guido, his tone changing.
Then he seemed about to speak again, but checked himself.

Lamberti rested his elbows on the table and his chin on his folded
hands, and looked into his friend's eyes in silence. His own face had
grown perceptibly paler in the last few minutes.

"Guido," he said, after what seemed a long pause, "you were going to ask
what happened next. I do not know what you thought, nor what stopped
you, for between you and me there is no such thing as indiscretion, and,
besides, you will never know who the lady was."

"I do not wish to guess. Do not say anything that could help me."

"Of course not. Any woman you know might have taken it into her head to
go to the Forum this morning."

"Certainly."

"This is what happened. I stood perfectly still in surprise. She may
have heard my footstep or not; she knew some one was behind her. Then
she slowly turned her head till we could see each other's faces."

He paused again, and passed one hand lightly over his eyes.

"Yes," said Guido, "I suppose I can guess what is coming."

"No!" Lamberti cried, in such a tone that the other started. "You cannot
guess. We looked at each other. It seemed a very long time--two or three
minutes at least--as if we were both paralysed. Though we recognised
each other perfectly well, we could neither of us speak. Then it seemed
to me that something I could not resist was drawing me towards her, but
I am sure I did not really move the hundredth part of a step. I shall
never forget the look in her face."

Another pause, not long, but strangely breathless.

"I have seen men badly frightened in battle," Lamberti went on. "The
cheeks get hollow all at once, the eyes are wide open, with black rings
round them, the face turns a greenish grey, and the sweat runs down the
forehead into the eyebrows. Men totter with fear, too, as if their
joints were unstrung. But I never saw a woman really terrified before.
There was a sort of awful tension of all her features, as though they
were suddenly made brittle, like beautiful glass, and were going to
shiver into fragments. And her eyes had no visible pupils--her lips
turned violet. I remember every detail. Then, without warning, she
shrieked and staggered backwards; and she turned as I moved to catch
her, and she ran like a deer, straight up the court, past those basins
they have excavated, and up two or three steps, to the dark rooms at the
other end."

"And what did you do?" asked Guido, wondering.

"My dear fellow, I turned and went back as fast as I could, without
exactly running, and I found the guide looking for me below the temple,
for he had not seen me go into the Vestals' house. What else was there
to be done?"

"Nothing, I suppose. You could not pursue a lady who shrieked with fear
and ran away from you. What a strange story! You say you only know her
slightly."

"Literally, very slightly," answered Lamberti.

He had become fluent, telling his story almost excitedly. He now
relapsed into his former mood, and stared at the pamphlet before him a
moment, before shutting it and putting it away from him.

"It is like all those things--perfectly unaccountable, except on a
theory of coincidence," said Guido, at last. "Will you have any cheese?"

Lamberti roused himself and saw the servant at his elbow.

"No, thank you. I forgot one thing. Just as I awoke from that dream last
night, I heard the door of my room softly closed."

"What has that to do with the matter?" enquired Guido, carelessly.

"Nothing, except that the door was locked. I always lock my door. I
first fell into the habit when I was travelling, for I sleep so soundly
that in a hotel any one might come in and steal my things. I should
never wake. So I turn the key before going to bed."

"You may have forgotten to do it last night," suggested Guido.

"No. I got up at once, and the key was turned. No one could have come
in."

"A mouse, then," said Guido, rather contemptuously.




                                 CHAPTER V


Cecilia Palladio was very much ashamed of having uttered a cry of terror
at the sight of Lamberti, and still more of having run away from him
like a frightened child. To him it seemed as if she had really shrieked
with fear, whereas she fancied that she had scarcely found voice enough
to utter an incoherent exclamation. The truth lay somewhere between the
two impressions, but Cecilia now felt that she could easily have
accounted for being startled into crying out, but that it would always
be impossible to explain her flight. She had run the whole length of the
Court, which must be fifty yards long, before realising what she was
doing, and had not paused for breath till she was out of his sight and
within the second of the three rooms on the left. There were no gates to
the rooms then, as there are now, and she could not have given any
reason for her entering the second instead of the first, which was the
nearest. The choice was instinctive.

She certainly had not gone there to join the elderly woman servant who
had come to the Forum with her. That excellent and obedient person was
waiting where Cecilia had made her sit down, not far from the entrance
to the Forum, and would not move till her mistress returned. The young
girl hated to be followed about and protected at every step, especially
by a servant, who could have no real understanding of what she saw.

"I shall only be seen by foreigners and Cook's Tourists," she had said,
"and they do not count as human beings at all!"

Therefore the middle-aged Petersen, who was a German, and therefore a
species of foreigner herself, had meekly sat down upon the comparatively
comfortable stone which Cecilia had selected for her, and which was one
of the steps of the Julian Basilica. She was called Frau Petersen, Mrs.
Petersen, or Madame Petersen, according to circumstances, by the
servants of different nationalities who were successively in the
employment of the Countess Fortiguerra, for she was a superior woman and
the widow of a paymaster in the Bavarian army, and so eminently
respectable and well educated that she had more than once been taken for
Cecilia's governess.

Petersen was excessively near-sighted, but her nose was not adapted by
its nature and position for wearing eyeglasses; for it was not only a
flat nose without anything like a prominent bridge to it, but it was
placed uncommonly low in her face, so that a pair of eyeglasses pinched
upon it would have found themselves in the region of Petersen's
cheek-bones. Even when she wore spectacles, they were always slipping
down, which was a great nuisance; so she resigned herself to seeing less
than other people, except when something interested her enough to make
the discomfort of glasses worth enduring.

This sufficiently explains why she noticed nothing unusual in Cecilia's
looks when the latter came back to her, pale and disturbed; and she had
not heard her mistress's faint cry, the distance being too great for
that, not to mention the fact that the huge ruins intercepted the sound.
Cecilia was glad of that, as she drove home with Petersen.

"Signor Lamberti has called," said the Countess Fortiguerra the next day
at luncheon. "I see by his card that he is in the Navy. You know he is
one of the Marchese Lamberti's sons. Shall we ask him to dinner?"

"Did you like him?" enquired Cecilia, evasively.

"He is not very good-looking," observed the Countess, whose judgment of
unknown people always began with their appearance, and often penetrated
no farther. "But he may be intelligent, for all that," she added, as a
concession.

"Yes," said Cecilia, thoughtfully, "perhaps."

"I think we might ask him to dinner, then," answered the Countess, as if
she had given an excellent reason for doing so.

"Is it not rather early, considering that we have only met him once?"
Cecilia ventured to ask.

"I used to know his mother very well, though she was older than I. It is
pleasant to find that he is so intimate with Signor d'Este. We might ask
them together."

"After the garden party," suggested Cecilia. "Of course, as you and the
Marchesa were great friends, that is a reason for asking the other, but
Signor d'Este--really! It would positively be throwing me at his head,
mother!"

"He expects it, my dear," answered the Countess, with more precision
than tact. "I mean," she added hastily, "I mean, that is, I did not
mean----"

Cecilia laughed.

"Oh yes, you did, mother! You meant exactly that, you know. You and that
dreadful old Princess have made up your minds that I am to marry him,
and nothing else matters, does it?"

"Well," said the Countess, without any perceptible hesitation, "I cannot
help hoping that you will consent, for I should like the match very
much."

She knew that it was always better to be quite frank with her daughter;
and even if she had thought otherwise, she could never have succeeded in
being diplomatic with her. While her second husband had been alive, her
position as an ambassadress had obliged her to be tactful in the world,
and even occasionally to say things which she had some difficulty in
believing, being a very simple soul; but with Cecilia she was quite
unable to conceal her thoughts for five minutes. If the girl loved her
mother, and she really did, it was largely because her mother was so
perfectly truthful. Cynical people called her helplessly honest, and
said that her veracity would have amounted to a disease of the mind if
she had possessed any; but that since she did not, it was probably a
form of degeneration, because all perfectly healthy human beings lied
naturally. David had said in his heart that all men were liars, and his
experience of men, and of women, too, was worth considering.

"Yes," Cecilia said, after a thoughtful pause, "I know that you wish me
to marry Signor d'Este, and I have not refused to think of it. But I
have not promised anything, either, and I do not like to feel that he
expects me to be thrust upon him at every turn, till he is obliged to
offer himself as the only way of escaping the persecution."

"I wish you would not express it in that way!"

The Countess sighed and looked at her daughter with a sort of
half-comical and loving hopelessness in her eyes--as a faithful dog
might look at his master who, seeming to be hungry, would refuse to
steal food that was within reach. The dog would try to lead the man to
the bread, the man would gently resist; each would be obeying the
dictation of his own conscience--the man would know that he could never
explain his moral position to the dog, and the dog would feel that he
could never understand the man. Yet the affection between the two would
not be in the least diminished.

On the next evening Cecilia found herself next to Guido d'Este at
dinner. Though she was not supposed to make her formal appearance in
society before the garden party, the Countess's many old friends, some
of whom had more or less impecunious sons, were anxious to welcome her
to Rome, and asked her to small dinners with her mother. Guido had
arrived late, and had not been able to speak to her till he was told by
their host that he was to take her in. It was quite natural that he
should, for, in spite of his birth, he was only plain Signor d'Este, and
was not entitled to any sort of precedence in a society which is, if
anything, overcareful in such matters.

Neither spoke as they walked through the rooms, near the end of the
small procession. Guido glanced at the young girl, who knew that he did,
but paid no attention. He thought her rather pale, and there was no
light in her eyes. Her hand lay like gossamer on his arm, so lightly
that he could not feel it; but he was aware of her perfectly graceful
motion as she walked.

"I suppose this was predestined," he said, as soon as the rest of the
guests were talking.

She glanced at him quickly now, her head bent rather low, her eyebrows
arching higher than usual. He was not sure whether the little
irregularity of her upper lip was accentuated by amusement, or by a
touch of scorn.

"Is it?" she asked. "Do you happen to know that it was arranged?"

It was amusement, then, and not scorn. They understood each other, and
the ice was in no need of being broken again.

"No," Guido answered with a smile. Then his voice grew suddenly low and
earnest. "Will you please believe that if I had been told beforehand
that I was asked in order to sit next to you, I would not have come?"

Cecilia laughed lightly.

"I believe you, and I understand," she answered. "But how it sounds! If
you had known that you were to sit next to me, nothing would have
induced you to come!"

From her place next the master of the house, the Countess Fortiguerra
looked at them, and was pleased to see that they were already on good
terms.

"Thank you," Cecilia added in a quiet voice, and gravely. "Besides," she
continued, "there is no reason, in the world why we should not be good
friends, is there?"

She looked full at him now, without a smile, and he realised for the
first time how very young she was. A married woman with an instinct for
flirtation might have made the speech, but a girl older than Cecilia
would have known that it might be misunderstood. Guido answered her look
with one in which doubt did not keep the upper hand more than a single
second.

"There is no reason whatever why we should not be the best of friends,"
he answered, in a tone as low as her own. "Perhaps I may be of service
to you. I hope so. Besides, I am made for friendship!"

He laughed rather carelessly as he spoke the last words, and glanced
round the table to see whether anybody was watching him. He met the
Countess Fortiguerra's approving glance.

"Why do you laugh at friendship?" asked Cecilia, not quite pleased.

"I do not laugh at friendship at all," Guido answered. "I laugh in order
that people may see me and hear me. This is the first service I can
render you, to be natural and unconcerned, as I generally am. If I
behaved in any unusual way--if I were too grave, or too much
interested--you understand!"

"Yes. You are thoughtful. Thank you."

There was a little pause, during which a luxuriant lady in green, who
sat on Guido's other side, determined to attract his attention, and
spoke to him; but before he could answer, some one opposite asked her a
question about dress, which was intensely interesting to her, because
she dressed abominably. She promptly fell into the snare which had been
set for her with the evil intention of leading her on to talk foolishly.
She followed at once, and Guido was free again.

"Now that we are friends," he said to Cecilia, "may I ask you a friendly
question?"

"Ask me anything you like," she answered, and her innocent eyes promised
him the truth.

"Were you told anything, before we met at my aunt's the other day?"

"Not a word! And you?"

"Nothing," he replied. "I remember that on that very afternoon----" he
stopped short.

"What?"

"You may not like what I was going to say."

"I shall, if it is true, and if you have a good reason for saying it."

"Lamberti and I were together, talking, and I said that nothing would
ever induce me to marry an heiress, unless it were to save my father or
mother from ruin. As that can never happen, all heiresses are perfectly
safe from me! Do you mind my having said that?"

"No. I am sure you were in earnest."

A shadow had crossed her face at the mention of Lamberti's name.

"You do not like my friend," he said, and as he spoke, the shadow came
again and deepened.

"How can I like him or dislike him? I hardly know him."

She felt very uncomfortable, for it would have been quite natural that
Lamberti should have spoken to Guido of her strange behaviour in the
Forum. Guido answered that one often liked or disliked people at first
sight.

"I think that you and I liked each other as soon as we met," he
concluded.

"Yes," Cecilia answered, after a little thought. "I am sure we did. Tell
me, what makes you think that I dislike your friend? I should be very
sorry if he thought I did."

"When I first spoke of him a few moments ago, your expression changed,
and when I referred to him again, you frowned."

"Is that all? Are you sure that is the only reason for your opinion?"

Guido laughed a little.

"What other reason could I have?" he asked. "Do not take it so
seriously!"

"He might have told you that he himself had the impression----"

"He has hardly mentioned your name since we both met you," Guido
answered.

It was a relief to know that Lamberti had not spoken of having met her
unexpectedly, and of her cry, and of her flight. Yet somehow she had
already been sure that he had kept the matter to himself. As a matter of
fact, Guido had never thought of her, even in the most passing way, as
the possible heroine of the adventure in the Forum. The story had
interested him, but the personality of the lady did not; and, moreover,
from the way in which Lamberti had spoken, Guido had very naturally
supposed her to be a married woman, for it would not have occurred to
him that a young girl could be strolling among the ruins quite alone.

Cecilia felt relieved, and yet, at the same time, she felt a little
girlish disappointment at the thought that Lamberti had hardly ever
spoken of her to his most intimate friend, for she was quite sure that
Guido told her the exact truth. She was angry with herself for being
disappointed, too. The man's face had haunted her so long in half-waking
dreams; or at least, a face exactly like his, which, the last time, had
turned into his without doubt. Yet she had evidently made no impression
upon him, until she had made a very bad one, the other day. She wondered
whether he thought she was a little mad. She was afraid of meeting him
wherever she went, and yet she now wished he were at the table, in order
that she might prove to him that she was not only sane, but very clever.
She knew that she wished it, and for a few moments she did not hear what
Guido was saying, but gazed absently at the flowers on the table,
unconsciously hoping that she might see them turn into the face she
feared; but that did not happen.

Guido talked on, till he saw that she was not listening, and then he was
silent, and only glanced at her from time to time while he heard in his
ears the cackling of the vivid lady in green. There was going to be a
change in the destinies of womankind, and everybody was to be perfectly
frightful for ever afterwards. To be plain, the sleeves "they" were
wearing now were to be altogether given up. "They" had begun to wear the
new ones already in Paris. Réjane had worn them in her new piece, and of
course that meant an imminent and universal change. And as for the way
the skirts were to be made, it was positively indecent. Réjane was far
too much of a lady to wear one, of course, but one could see what was
coming. Here some one observed that coming events cast their shadows
before.

"Not at all, not at all!" cried the lady in green. "I mean behind."

"How long shall you stay in Rome?" Guido asked, to see whether Cecilia
would hear him now.

"Always," she answered. "For the rest of my life."

"I am glad of that. But I meant to ask how late you intended to stay
this year?"

"I should like to spend the summer here."

"It is the pleasantest time," Guido said.

"Is it? Or are you only saying that in order to agree with me? You need
not, you know. I like people who have their own opinions, and are full
of prejudices, and try to force them upon everybody, whether they are
good for every one or not!"

"I am afraid I shall not please you, then. I have no prejudices to speak
of, and my opinions are worth so little that I never hesitate to change
them."

"But you do not look at all feeble-minded," said Cecilia, innocently
studying his face.

"Thank you!" Guido laughed. "You are adorable!" he added rather
flippantly.

"Is that your opinion?" asked the young girl, smiling, too, as if she
were pleased.

"Yes. That is my firm opinion. Do you object to it?"

"Oh no!" Cecilia answered, still smiling sweetly. "You have just told me
that your opinions are worth so little that you never hesitate to change
them. So why in the world should I object to any of them?"

"Exactly," said Guido, unmoved. "Why should you? Especially as this
particular one gives me so much pleasure while it lasts."

"It will not last long, I daresay. Do you know that you are not at all
dull?"

"No one could be in your company."

"That is the first dull thing you have said this evening," Cecilia
answered, to see what he would say.

"Shall it be the last?" he asked.

"Yes, please."

There was a little wilful command in the tone that Guido liked. He felt
her presence in a way he did not remember to have felt that of any
woman, and in the atmosphere of her own in which she seemed to live he
breathed as one does in some very high places, less easily, perhaps, but
with conscious pleasure in drawing breath. He could not have described
his sensations in those first meetings with her, and he could have
analysed them less. One might as well seek the form and perfume of the
flower in the first tender shoot that thrusts up its joy of living out
of the mystery of the dull brown earth. Yet he knew well enough that
something was beginning to grow in him which had not begun, and grown,
and perished before.

Many times he had talked with women famous for their beauty, or for
their charm, or for their wit, and he himself had said clever things
which he had remembered with a little vanity or had forgotten with
regret, and had turned compliments in many manners, guessing at the
taste of her who sat beside him, wishing to please her, and wishing even
more to find some general key to women's thought, some universal
explanation of their ways, some logical solution of their seemingly
inconsequent actions. His mind was of the sort that is satisfied by
suspended judgment, that dreads the chillingly triumphant phrase of
reason, "which was to be proved," as much as the despairing tone of a
reduction to the impossible. He loved problems that could not be solved
easily, if at all, because he could think of them continually in a
hundred new and different ways. He hated equally a final affirmation
past appeal, and an ultimate negation which might make his thoughts
ridiculous in his own eyes. A quiet suspense was his natural state of
equilibrium. Anything might be, or might not be, and decision was
hateful; it was delicious to float on the calm waters of meditative
indifference, between the giant rocks, hope and despair, in the straits
that lead the sea of life to the ocean of eternity.

He knew that he was the end of a race that had reigned and could never
reign again. It was better that the end should be a question than a hope
deceived, or a cry of impotent hatred uttered against Something which
might not exist after all. If he had a philosophy it was that, and
nothing more; and though it was not much, it had helped him to live
without much pain and almost always with a certain dreamy, intellectual,
wondering pleasure in his own thoughts. Sometimes he was irritated out
of that state by the demands and doings of the Princess Anatolie, as on
the day when he and his friend had talked in the garden beyond the
river; and then he spoke of ending all at a stroke, and almost believed
that he might do it; and he envied Lamberti his love of life and action.
But such moods soon passed and left him himself again, so that he
marvelled how he could ever have been so much moved. It was always the
same, in the end, but such as it was the world was not a bad world for
him.

Here was something different from all the past, and it had begun without
warning, and was growing against his will, because it fed on that with
which his will had nothing to do. There is no fatalism like that of the
indifferent man who believes in nothing, not even in himself, and who
admits nothing to be positive except crime and dishonour. Why should he
not fall in love with Cecilia Palladio, since he had previously stated
to himself, to her, and to his trusted friend, that nothing could induce
him to marry her? It was quite clear from the first that she, on her
side, would never fall in love with him. He looked upon that as
altogether out of the question, and perhaps with reason. On the other
hand, he had not the slightest faith in the lasting nature of anything
he might feel, and therefore he was not afraid of consequences, which
rarely indeed frighten a man who is doing what he likes. It is more
generally the woman that thinks of them, and points them out because
"there is still time!" She also heaps her scorn upon the man if he is
wise enough to agree with her; but that is a detail, and perhaps it
ought not to be mentioned.

As for the fact that he was beginning to be in love, Guido no longer
doubted it. The pleasure he felt in saying to Cecilia things of even
less than average conversational merit was proof enough that it was not
only what he said that interested him. When a man of ordinary assurance
wishes to shine in the eyes of a woman, he generally succeeds at least
in shining in his own.

Guido was not any more self-conscious than most people, and he was
certainly not more diffident of his own gifts, which he could judge
impartially because he attached little importance to what they might
bring him. But the categorical command to say nothing dull made it quite
impossible to say anything witty, and the conversation languished a
little and then broke off.

It was past ten o'clock when Guido again found a chance of speaking to
Cecilia. He had looked at her more often than he knew, after dinner, and
had given rather vague answers to one or two people who had spoken to
him. He had moved about the great room idly, looking at the familiar old
portraits, and at objects he had known in the same places for years. He
had smoked a cigarette, standing with his host, while the latter talked
to him about the Etruscan tomb he had just discovered on his place, and
he had nodded pleasantly to the sound of the old gentleman's voice
without hearing a word. Then he had smoked another cigarette at the
opposite end of the room with a group of younger men, who talked of
nothing but motor cars; and when they asked his opinion about something,
he had said that he had none, and preferred walking, which speech caused
such a perceptible chill that he turned away and left the young men to
their discussion.

All the while his eyes followed Cecilia's movements, and lingered upon
her when she stood still or sat down. In the course of the evening each
of the young men who talked about motor cars managed to try his luck at
a conversation with her, and all, by way of being original, talked to
her about the same thing. As she had just come from Paris, and was rich,
it was to be supposed that she, of course, owned a motor car, had passed
her examination as an engineer, and spent most of her time in a mask and
broad-visored cap scouring Europe at the rate of fifty miles an hour.

"But why do you not get an automobile?" asked each of the young men, as
soon as her answer had disappointed him.

"Do you play the violin?" she enquired sweetly of each.

"No," each answered.

"Then why do you not get a violin?"

In this way she confounded the young men, and their heads moved uneasily
on the tops of their high collars, until they were able to get away from
her.

Guido saw how they left her, with a discomfited expression, and as if
they had suddenly acquired the conviction that their clothes did not fit
them, for that is generally the first sensation experienced by a very
well-dressed young man when he has been made to feel that he is foolish.
Guido saw, and understood, and he was worldly wise enough to know that
unless Cecilia would show a little more willingness to seem pleased, she
would presently be sitting alone on a sofa, waiting for her mother to go
home. As soon as this inevitable result followed, he sat down beside
her. She turned her face slowly, when he had settled himself, and she
looked at him with slightly bent head, a little upwards, from under her
lids. The light that fell from a shaded lamp above her marked the sharp
curve of arching brows sharply against the warm shadow over the deep-set
and widely opened eyes.

For a few seconds Guido returned the steady gaze, before he spoke.

"Are you the Sphinx?" he asked suddenly. "Have you come to life again to
ask men your riddle?"

"I ask it of myself," she answered softly, and then looked away. "I
cannot answer it."

"Are you good or evil?" Guido asked, speaking again.

The questions came to his lips as if some one else were asking them with
his voice.

"Good--I think," answered the young girl, motionless beside him. "But I
might be very bad."

"What is the riddle?" Guido enquired, and now he felt that he was
speaking out of his own curiosity, and not as the mouthpiece of some one
in a dream. "Do you ask yourself what it all means? I suppose so. We all
ask that, and we never get any answer."

"It is too vague a question. It cannot have a definite answer. No. I ask
three questions which I found in a German book of philosophy when I was
a little girl. I tried hard to understand what all the rest of the book
was about, but I found on one page three questions, printed by
themselves. I can see the page now, and the questions were numbered one,
two, and three. I have asked them ever since."

"What were they?"

"They were these: 'What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I
hope?'"

"There would be everything in the answers," Guido said, "for they are
big questions. I think I have answered them all in the negative in my
own life. I know nothing, I do nothing, and I hope nothing."

Cecilia looked at him again. "I would not be you," she said gravely. "I
can do nothing, perhaps, and I am sure I know nothing worth knowing, but
I hope. I have that at least. I hope everything, with all my heart and
soul--everything, even things you could not dream of."

"Help me to dream of them. Perhaps I might."

"Then dream that faith is knowledge, that charity is action, and that
hope is heaven itself," answered Cecilia.

Her voice was sweet and low, and far away as spirit land, and Guido
wondered at the words.

"Where did you hear that?" he asked.

"Ah, where?" she asked, almost sadly, and very longingly. "If I could
tell you that, I should know the great secret, the only secret ever yet
worth knowing. Where have we heard the voices that come back to us, not
in sleeping dreams only, but when we are waking, too, voices that come
back softly like evening bells across the sea, with the touch of hands
that lay in ours long ago, and faces that we know better than our own!
Where was it all, before the memory of it all was here?"

"I have often wondered whether those impressions are memories," said
Guido.

"What else could they be?" Cecilia asked, her tone growing colder at
once.

Guido had been happy in listening to her talk, with its suggestion of
fantastical extravagance, but he had not known how to answer her, nor
how to lead her on. He felt that the spell was broken, because something
was lacking in himself. To be a magician one must believe in magic,
unless one would be a mere conjurer. Guido at least knew enough not to
answer the girl's last question with a string of so-called scientific
theories about atavism and transmitted recollections. If he had taken
that ground he would have been surprised to find that Cecilia Palladio
was quite as familiar with it as himself.

"I am afraid," he said, "that I am not fit to talk with you about such
things. You start from a point which I can never hope to reach, and
instead of coming down to me, you rise higher and higher, almost out of
my sight. I am afraid that if our friendship is to be real, it will be a
one-sided bond."

"How do you mean?" asked the young girl, who had listened.

"It will mean much more to me than it ever can to you."

"No," Cecilia answered. "I think I shall like you very much."

"I like you very much already," said Guido, smiling. "I have an amusing
idea."

"Have you? What is it? Neither of us has been very amusing this
evening."

"Suppose that we take advantage of the Princess's conspiracy. Shall we?"

"My mother is the other conspirator!" Cecilia laughed.

"Is there any harm in letting people see that we like each other?" Guido
asked.

"None in the least. Every one hopes that we may. Besides----" she stopped
short.

"What is the other consideration?" Guido enquired.

"If I am perfectly frank--brutally frank--shall you be less my friend?"

"No. Much more."

"I do not wish to marry at all," said Cecilia, and again she reminded
him of the Sphinx. "But if I ever should change my mind, since you and I
have been picked out to make a match, I suppose I might as well marry
you as any one else."

"Oh, quite as well!"

Then Guido laughed, as he rarely did, not loudly, but with all his
heart, and Cecilia did not try to check her amusement either.

"I suppose it really is very funny," she said.

"The only thing necessary is that no one should ever guess that we have
made a compact. That would be fatal."

"No one!" cried the young girl, eagerly. "No one! Not even your friend!"

"Lamberti? No, least of all, Lamberti!"

"Why do you say, least of all?"

"Because you do not like him," Guido answered, with perfect sincerity.

"Oh! I see. I am not sure, of course, but I am glad you do not mean to
tell him. It would make me nervous to think that he might know. I--I am
not quite certain why it makes me nervous, but it does."

"Have no fear. When shall I see you?"

He had noticed that Cecilia's mother was beginning that little comedy of
movements, and glances, and uneasy turnings of the head, by which
mothers of marriageable daughters signify their intention of going home.
The works of a clock probably act in the same way before striking.

"I will make my mother ask you to dinner. Are you free to-morrow night?"

"Any night."

"No--I mean really. Are you?"

"Yes, really. Lamberti does not count, for we generally dine together
when we have no other engagement."

The shadow again flitted across Cecilia's brow, and she said nothing,
only nodding quickly. Then she looked across the room at her mother.
Young girls are always instantly aware that their mothers are making
signs. When Nelson's commander-in-chief signalled to him at the battle
of Copenhagen the order to retire, Nelson put his spy-glass to his blind
eye and assured his officers that he could see nothing, went on, and won
the fight. Every young girl is totally blind of one eye during periods
that vary between ten minutes and three hours.

Cecilia having recovered her sight, and seen her mother, rose with
obedient alacrity.

"Good night," she said to Guido. "I am glad we are friends."

Their glances met for a moment, and Guido made an imperceptible gesture
to put out his hand, but she did not answer it. He thought her refusal a
little old-fashioned, since young girls now shake hands in Italy more
often than not; but he liked her ways, chiefly because they were hers,
and, moreover, he remembered just then that at her age she was supposed
to be barely out of the schoolroom or the convent.




                               CHAPTER VI


"Spiritualism, your Highness, is the devil, without doubt," said the
learned ecclesiastical archæologist, Don Nicola Francesetti, in an
apologetic tone, and looking at his knees. "If there is anything more
heretical, it is a belief in a possible migration of souls from one body
to another, in a series of lives."

The Princess Anatolie smiled at the excellent man and exchanged a glance
of compassionate intelligence with Monsieur Leroy. She did not care a
straw what the Church thought about anything except Protestants and
Jews, and she did not believe that Don Nicola cared either. He chanced
to be a priest, instead of a professor, and it was of course his duty to
protest against heresy when it was thrust under his cogitative
observation. Spiritualism was not exactly heresy, therefore he said it
was the devil, and no mistake; but as she was sure that he did not
believe in the devil, that only proved that he did not believe in
spiritualism.

In this she was mistaken, however, as people often are in their judgment
of priests. Nicola Francesetti had long ago placed his conscience in
safety, so to speak, by telling himself that he was not a theologian,
but an archæologist, and that as he could not afford to divide his time
and his intelligence between two subjects, where one was too vast, it
was therefore his plain duty to think about all questions of religion as
the Church taught him to think. He admitted that if his life could begin
again he would perhaps not again enter the priesthood, but he would
never have conceded that he could have been anything but a believing
Catholic. He had no vocation whatever for saving souls, whereas he
possessed the archæological gift in a high degree; and yet, as a
clergyman and a good Christian, he was convinced at heart that a man in
holy orders had no right to give his whole life and strength to another
profession. He had asked the advice of a wise and good man on this
point, however, and the theologian had thought that he should continue
to live as he was living. Had he a cure? No, he had none. Had he ever
evaded a priest's work? That is, had work been offered to him where a
priest was needed, and where he could have done active good, and had he
refused because it was distasteful to him? No, never. Was he receiving
any stipend for performing a priest's duties, with the tacit
understanding that he was at liberty to pay an impecunious substitute a
part of the money for taking his place, so that he himself profited by
the transaction? No, certainly not. Don Nicola had a sufficient income
of his own to live on. Had he ever made a solemn promise to devote his
life to missionary labours among the heathen? No.

"In that case, my dear friend," concluded the theologian, "you are
tormenting yourself with perfectly useless scruples. You are making a
mountain of your molehill, and when you have made your mountain you will
not be satisfied until you have made another beside it. In the course of
time you will, in fact, oppress your innocent conscience with a whole
range of mountains; you will be immobilised under the weight, and then
you will become hateful to yourself, useless to others, and an object of
pity to wise men. Stick to your archæology."

"Is pure study a good in itself?" asked Don Nicola.

"What is good?" retorted the theologian viciously. "I wish you would
define it!"

Don Nicola was silent, for though he could think of a number of synonyms
for the conception, he remembered no definition corresponding to any of
them. He waited.

"Good and goodness are not the same thing," observed the theologian;
"you might as well say that study and knowledge are the same thing."

"But study should lead to knowledge."

"And goodness should lead to good; and, compared with ignorance,
knowledge is a form of good. Therefore study is a form of goodness.
Consequently, as you have a turn for erudition, the best thing you can
do is to go on with your studies."

"I see," said Don Nicola.

"I wish I did," sighed the theologian, when the priest was gone. "How
very pleasant it must be, to be an archæologist!"

After that, whenever Don Nicola was troubled with uneasiness about his
profession, he soothed himself with his friend's little syllogism, which
was as full of holes as a sieve, as flimsy as a tissue-paper balloon,
and as unstable as a pyramid upside down, but nevertheless perfectly
satisfactory.

"Of course," says humanity, "I know nothing about it. But I am perfectly
sure."

And so forth. And moreover, if humanity were not frequently quite sure
of things concerning which it knows nothing, the world would soon come
to a standstill, and never move again; like the ass in the fable, that
died of hunger in its stall between two bundles of hay, unable to decide
which to eat first. That also was an instance of stable equilibrium.

Don Nicola avoided all questions of religion in general conversation,
and tried to make other people avoid them when he was the only clergyman
present, because he did not like to be asked his opinion about them. But
when the Princess Anatolie and Monsieur Leroy gravely declared their
belief in the communications of departed persons by means of rappings,
not to say by touch, and by strains of music, and perfumes, and even, on
rare occasions, by actual apparition, then Don Nicola felt that it was
his duty to protest, and he accordingly protested with considerable
energy. He said that spiritualism was the devil.

"The chief object of the devil's existence," observed Monsieur Leroy,
"is to bear responsibility."

The Princess laughed and nodded her approval, as she always did when
Monsieur Leroy said anything which she thought clever. Don Nicola was
too wise to discuss the matter, if, indeed, it admitted of discussion;
for the devil was certainly responsible for a good deal.

"Your definition of spiritualism is so very liberal," Monsieur Leroy
added, with a fine supercilious smile on his red lips.

"It is not mine," answered Don Nicola, modestly.

"No. I suppose it is the opinion of the Church. At all events, you do
not doubt the possibility of communicating with the spirits of dead
persons, do you?"

"I have never examined the matter, my dear sir."

"It seems to me," said Monsieur Leroy, with airy superiority, "that it
is rather rash to attribute to Satan everything which you will not take
the trouble to examine."

"Hush, Doudou!" cried the Princess. "You are very rude!"

"Not at all, not at all, your Highness!" protested Don Nicola, rising.
"I should be very much surprised if Monsieur Leroy expressed himself
differently."

Monsieur Leroy had no retort ready, and tried to smile.

"It will give me the greatest pleasure to be your guide to the new
excavations in the Forum," added the priest, as he took his leave.

The Princess and Monsieur Leroy were left alone.

"Shall we?" he asked after a moment's silence, and waited anxiously for
the answer.

"I am afraid They will not come to-night, Doudou," said the Princess.
"You have excited yourself in argument. You know that always has a bad
effect."

"That man irritates me," answered Monsieur Leroy, peevishly. "Why do you
receive him?"

He spoke in the tone of a spoilt child--a spoilt child of forty, or
thereabouts.

"I thought you liked him," replied the Princess, very meekly. "I will
give orders that he is not to be received. We will not go to the Forum
with him."

"No, no! How you exaggerate! You always think that I mean a great deal
more than I say. I only said that he irritated me."

"Why should you be irritated for nothing? You know it is bad for you."

She looked at him with an air of concern, and there was a gentleness in
her eyes which few had ever seen in them.

"It does not matter," answered Monsieur Leroy, crossly.

He had risen, and he brought a very small and light mahogany table from
a corner. It was one of those which used to be made during the second
Empire in sets of six and of successive sizes, so that each fitted each
under the next larger one. He moved awkwardly and yet without noise;
there was something very womanish in his figure and gait.

He set the little table before the Princess, very close to her, lit a
single candle, which he placed on the floor behind an arm-chair, and
turned out the electric light. Then he sat down on the opposite side of
the table and spread out his hands upon it, side by side, the right
thumb resting on the left. The Princess did the same. They glanced at
each other once or twice, hardly distinguishing each other's features in
the gloom. Then they looked steadily down upon the table, and neither
stirred for a long time.

"I am sure They will not come," said the Princess at last, in a very low
voice.

"Hush!"

Silence again, for a quarter of an hour. Somewhere in the room a small
clock, or a watch, ticked quickly, with a little rhythmical, insisting
accent on the fourth beat.

"It moved, then!" whispered the Princess, excitedly.

"Yes. Hush!"

The little table certainly moved, with a queerly soft rocking motion, as
if its feet only just touched the carpet and supported no weight. The
Princess's hands felt as if they were floating over tiny rippling waves,
and between her shoulders came the almost stinging thrill she loved. She
wished that the room were quite dark now, in order that she might feel
more. There were tiny beads of perspiration on Monsieur Leroy's
forehead, and his hands were moist. The candle behind the arm-chair
flickered.

"Are You there?" asked Monsieur Leroy, in a voice unlike his own.

There was no answer. The table moved more uneasily.

"Rap once for 'yes,' twice for 'no,'" said Monsieur Leroy. "Is this the
first time you have come to us?"

One rap answered the question, sharp and clear, as if the butt of a
pencil had struck the table underneath it and near the middle.

"Are you the spirit of a man?"

Two raps very distinct.

"Then you are a woman. Tell us----"

Several raps came in quick succession, in pairs, as if to repeat the
negative energetically. Monsieur Leroy seemed to hesitate what question
to ask.

"Perhaps it is a child," suggested the Princess, in a tremulous tone.

A sharp rap. Yes, it was a child. Was it a little girl? Yes. Had it been
dead long? Yes. More than ten years? Yes. More than twenty? Yes. Fifty?
No. Forty? Yes.

Monsieur Leroy began to count, pausing after each number.

"Forty-one--forty-two--forty-three--forty-four----"

The sharp rap again. The Princess drew a quick breath.

"How old was it when it died?" she managed to ask.

Monsieur Leroy began to count again, beginning with one. At the word
seven, the rap came. The Princess started violently, almost upsetting
the table against her companion.

"Adelaide!" She cried in a broken voice.

One rap.

"Oh, my darling, my darling!"

The old woman bent down over the table, and her outspread hands tried
frantically to take up the flat surface, and she kissed the polished
wood passionately, again and again, not knowing what she did, nor
hearing her own incoherent words of mixed joy and agony.

"My child! My little thing--my sweet--speak to me----"

Her whole being was convulsed. Little storms of rappings seemed to
answer her. The perspiration trickled down Monsieur Leroy's temples. He
seemed to be making an effort altogether beyond his natural strength.

"Speak to me--call me by the little name!" sobbed the Princess, and her
tears wet her hands and the table.

Monsieur Leroy began to repeat the alphabet. From time to time a rap
stopped him at a letter, and then he began over again. In this way the
rapping spelt out the word "Mamette."

"She says 'Mamette,'" said Monsieur Leroy, in a puzzled tone. "Does that
mean anything?"

But the Princess burst into passionate weeping. It was the name she had
asked for, the child's own pet name for her, its mother; it was the last
word the poor little dying lips had tried to form. Never since that
moment had the heart-broken woman spoken it, never since the fourth year
before Monsieur Leroy had been born.

He looked at her, for he seemed to have preserved his self-control, and
he saw that if matters went much further the poor sobbing woman would
reach a state which might be dangerous. He withdrew his hands from the
table and waited.

"She is gone, but she will come again now, whenever you call her," he
said gently.

"No, do not go!" cried the Princess, clutching at the smooth wood
frantically. "Come back, come back and speak to me once more!"

"She is gone, for to-night," said Monsieur Leroy, in the same gentle
tone. "I am very much exhausted."

He pressed his handkerchief to his forehead and to his temples, again
and again, while the Princess moaned, her cheek upon the table, as she
had once let it rest upon the breast of her dead child.

Monsieur Leroy rose cautiously, fearing to disturb her. He was trembling
now, as men sometimes do who have escaped alive from a great danger. He
steadied himself by the back of the arm-chair, behind which the candle
was burning steadily. With an effort, he stooped and took up the
candlestick and set it on the table. Then he looked at his watch and saw
that it was past eleven o'clock.




                               CHAPTER VII


It was some time since Guido had seen Lamberti, but the latter had
written him a line to say that he was going with a party of men to stop
in an old country house near the seashore, not far from Cività Vecchia.
The quail were very abundant in May that year, and Lamberti was a good
shot. He had left home suddenly on the morning after telling Guido the
story of his adventure in the Forum. Guido had at first been mildly
surprised that his friend should not have spoken of his intention on
that evening; but some one had told him that the party had been made up
at the club, late at night, which accounted for everything.

Guido was soon too much occupied to miss the daily companionship, and
was glad to be alone, when he could not be with Cecilia. He no longer
concealed from himself that he was very much in love with her, and that,
compared with this fact, nothing in his previous life had been of any
importance whatever. Even the circumstances of his position with regard
to his aunt sank into insignificance. She might do what she pleased, she
might try to ruin him, she might persecute him to the extreme limit of
her ingenuity, she might invent calumnies intended to disgrace him; he
was confident of victory and sure of himself.

One of the first unmistakable signs of genuine love is the certainty of
doing the impossible. An hour before meeting Cecilia, Guido had been
reduced to the deepest despondency, and had talked gravely of ending a
life that was not worth living. A fortnight had passed, and he defied
his aunt, Monsieur Leroy, the whole world, an adverse fate, and the
powers of evil. They might do their worst, now, for he was full of
strength, and ten times more alive than he had ever been before.

It was true that he could not see the smallest change in Cecilia's
manner towards him since the memorable evening on which she had
laughingly agreed to take advantage of what was thrust upon them both.
Her colour did not change by the least shade of a blush when she met
him; there was not the slightest quivering of the delicate eyelids,
there was nothing but the most friendly frankness in the steady look of
welcome. But she liked him very much, and was at no pains to conceal it.
She liked him better than any one she had ever met in her short life,
except her stepfather, and she told Guido so with charming unconcern.
As he could not be jealous of the dead ambassador, he was not at all
discouraged by the comparison. Sometimes he was rather flattered by it,
and he could not but feel that he had already acquired a position from
which any future suitor would find it hard to dislodge him.

The Countess Fortiguerra looked on with wondering satisfaction. Her
daughter had not led her to believe that she would readily accept what
must soon be looked upon by society as an engagement, and what would
certainly be one before long. When Guido went to see his aunt, she
received him with expansive expressions of affection.

He noticed a change in the Princess, which he could only explain by the
satisfaction he supposed she felt in his conduct. There were times when
her artificial face softened with a look of genuine feeling, especially
when she was silent and inattentive. Guido knew her well enough, he
thought, to impute these signs to her inward contentment at the prospect
of his marriage, from which she was sure of extracting notable financial
advantage. But in this he was not just, though he judged from long
experience. Monsieur Leroy alone knew the secret, and he kept his own
counsel.

An inquisitive friend asked the Countess Fortiguerra boldly whether she
intended to announce the engagement of her daughter at the garden party.

"No," she answered, without hesitation, "that would be premature."

She was careful, in a way, to do nothing irrevocable--never to take
Guido into her carriage, not to ask him to dinner when there were other
guests, not to leave him alone with Cecilia when there was a possibility
of such a thing being noticed by the servants, except by the discreet
Petersen, who could be trusted, and who strongly approved of Guido from
the first. But when it was quite safe, the Countess used to go and sit
in a little boudoir adjoining the drawing-room, leaving the doors open,
of course, and occupying herself with her correspondence; and Guido and
Cecilia talked without restraint.

The Countess had enough womanly and instinctive wisdom not to ask
questions of her daughter at this stage, but on the day before the
long-expected garden party she spoke to Guido alone, in a little set
speech which she had prepared with more conscientiousness than
diplomatic skill.

"You have seen," she said, "that I am always glad to receive you here,
and that I often leave you and Cecilia together in the drawing-room.
Dear Signor d'Este, I am sure you will understand me if I ask you
to--to--to tell me something."

She had meant to end the sentence differently, rounding it off with
"your intentions with regard to my daughter"; but that sounded like
something in a letter, so she tried to make it more vague. But Guido
understood, which is not surprising.

"You have been very kind to me," he said simply. "I love your daughter
sincerely, and if she will consent to marry me I shall do my best to
make her happy. But, so far, I have no reason to think that she will
accept me. Besides, whether you know it already or not, I must tell you
that I am a poor man. I have no fortune whatever, though I receive an
allowance by my father's will, which is enough for a bachelor. It will
cease at my death. Your daughter could make a very much more brilliant
marriage."

The good Countess had listened in silence. The Princess, for reasons of
her own, had explained Guido's position with considerable minuteness, if
not with scrupulous accuracy.

"Cecilia is rich enough to marry whom she pleases," the Countess
answered. "Even without considering her inclinations, your social
position would make up for your want of fortune."

"My social position is not very exalted," Guido answered, smiling at her
frankness. "I am plain 'Signor d'Este,' without any title whatsoever, or
without the least prospect of one."

"But your royal blood----" protested the Countess.

"I am more proud of the fact that my mother was an honest woman,"
replied Guido, quietly.

"Yes--oh--of course!" The Countess was a little abashed. "But you know
what I mean," she added, by way of making matters clear. "And as for
your fortune--I would say, your allowance, and all that--it really does
not matter. It is natural that you should have made debts, too. All
young men do, I believe."

"No," said Guido. "I have not a debt in the world."

"Really?"

The single word sounded more like an exclamation of extreme surprise
than like an interrogation, and the Countess, who was incapable of
concealment, stared at Guido for a moment in undisguised astonishment.

"Why are you so much surprised?" he asked, with evident amusement. "My
allowance is fifty thousand francs a year. That is not wealth, but it is
quite enough for me."

"Yes. I should think so. That is--of course, it is not much--is it? I
never know anything about money, you know! Baron Goldbirn manages
everything for us."

"I suppose," Guido said, looking at her curiously, "that some one must
have told you that I had made debts."

"Yes--yes! Some one did tell me so."

"Whoever said it was quite mistaken. I can easily satisfy you on that
point, for I am a very orderly person. I used to play high when I was
twenty-one, but I got tired of it, and I do not care for cards any
longer."

"It is very strange, all the same!" The Countess was still wondering,
though she believed him. "How people lie!" she exclaimed.

"Oh, admirably, and most of the time," Guido answered, with a little
laugh.

There was a short pause. He also was wondering who could have maligned
him. No doubt it must have been some designing mother who had a son to
marry.

"Forgive me," he said at last. "I have told you exactly what my position
is. Have you, on your side, any reason to think that your daughter will
consent?"

"Oh, I am sure she will!" answered the Countess, promptly.

Guido repressed a movement, and for an instant the colour rose faintly
in his face, then sank away.

"Quite sure?" he asked, controlling his voice.

"I mean, in the end, you know. She will marry you in the end. I am
convinced of it. But I think I had better not ask her just yet."

There were matters in regard to which she was distinctly afraid of her
daughter.

"May I?" Guido enquired. "Will you let me ask her to marry me, when I
think that the time has come?"

"Certainly! That is----" The Countess believed that she ought to hesitate.
"After all, we have only known you a fortnight. That is not long. Is
it?"

"No. But, on the other hand, you had never seen me when you and my aunt
agreed that your daughter and I should be married."

"How did you know that we had talked about it?"

"It was rather evident," Guido answered, with a smile.

The artlessness which is often a charm in a young girl looks terribly
like foolishness if it lasts till a woman is forty. Yet in old age it
may seem charming again, as if second childhood brought with it a second
innocence.

Guido was an Italian only by his mother, and from his father he
inherited the profoundly complicated character of races that had ruled
the world for a thousand years or more, and not always either wisely or
justly. Under his indifference and quiet dislike of all action, as well
as of most emotions, he had always felt the conflicting instincts
towards good and evil, and the contempt of consequences bordering on
folly, if not upon real insanity, which had brought about the decline
and fall of his father's kingdom. The perfect simplicity of the real
Italian character when in a state of equilibrium always amused him, and
often pleased him, and he had a genuine admiration for the splendidly
violent contrasts which it develops when roused by passion. He could
read it like an open book, and predict what it would do in almost any
circumstances.

For the first time in his life, he felt something of its directness in
himself, moving to a definite aim through the maze of useless
complications, hesitations, and turns and returns of thought with which
he was familiar in his own character. He smiled at the idea that he
might end by resembling Lamberti, with whom to think was to feel, and to
feel was to act. Were there two selves in him, of which the one was in
love, and the other was not? That was an amusing theory, and a fortnight
ago it would have been pleasant to sit in his room at night, among his
Dürers, his Rembrandts, and his pictures, with an old book on his knee,
dreaming about his two conflicting individualities. But somehow dreaming
had lost its charm of late. He thought only of one question, and asked
only one of the future. Was Cecilia Palladio's friendship about to turn
into anything that could be called love, or not? His intention warned
him that if the change had come she herself was not conscious of it. He
was authorised to ask her, now that the Countess had spoken--formally
authorised, but he was quite sure that if he had believed that she
already loved him, he would not have waited for any such permission. His
father's blood resented the restraint of all ordinary conventions, and
in the most profound inaction he had always morally and inwardly
reserved the right to do what he pleased, if he should ever care to do
anything at all.

He was just going to dress for dinner that evening when Lamberti came
in, a little more sunburned than usual, but thinner, and very restless
in his manner. Guido explained that he was going to dine with the
Countess Fortiguerra. He offered to telephone for permission to bring
Lamberti with him.

"Do you know them well enough for that already?" Lamberti asked.

"Yes. I have seen them a great deal since you left. Shall I ask?"

"No, thank you. I shall dine at home with my people."

"Shall you go to the garden party to-morrow?"

"No."

Guido looked at him curiously, and he immediately turned away, unlike
himself.

"Have you had any more strange dreams since I saw you?" Guido asked.

"Yes."

Lamberti did not turn round again, but looked attentively at an etching
on the table, so that Guido could not see his face. His monosyllabic
answers were nervous and sharp. It was clear that he was under some kind
of strain that was becoming intolerable, but of which he did not care to
speak.

"How is it going?" he asked suddenly.

"I think everything is going well," answered Guido, who knew what he
meant, though neither of them had spoken to the other of Cecilia, except
in the most casual way, since they had both met her.

"So you are going to marry an heiress after all," said Lamberti, with
something like a laugh.

"I love her," Guido replied. "I cannot help the fact that she is rich."

"It does no harm."

"Perhaps not, but I wish she had no more than I. If she had nothing at
all, I should be just as anxious to marry her."

"You do not suppose that I doubt that, do you?" Lamberti asked quickly.

"No. But you spoke at first as if you were reproaching me for changing
my mind."

"Did I? I am sorry. I did not mean it in that way. I was only thinking
that fate generally makes us do just what we do not intend. There is
something diabolically ingenious about destiny. It lies in wait for you,
it seems to leave everything to your own choice, it makes you think that
you are a perfectly free agent, and then, without the least warning, it
springs at you from behind a tree, knocks you down, tramples the breath
out of you, and drags you off by the heels straight to the very thing
you have sworn to avoid. Man a free agent? Nonsense! There is no such
thing as free will."

"What in the world has happened to you?" Guido asked, by way of answer.
"Is anything wrong?"

"Everything is wrong. Good night. You ought to be dressing for dinner."

"Come with me."

"To dine with people whom I hardly know, and who have not asked me?
Besides, I told you that I meant to dine at home."

"At least, promise me that you will go with me to-morrow to the Villa
Madama."

"No."

"Look here, Lamberti," said Guido, changing his tone, "you and I have
known each other since we were boys, and I do not believe there exist
two men who are better friends. I am not sure that the Contessina
Palladio will marry me, but her mother wishes it, and heaven knows that
I do. They are both perfectly well aware that you are my most intimate
friend. If you absolutely refuse to go near them they can only suppose
that you have something against them. They have already asked me if they
are never to see you. Now, what will it cost you to be decently civil to
a lady who may be my wife next year, and to her mother, who was your
mother's friend long ago? You need not stay half an hour at the villa
unless you please. But go with me. Let them see you with me. If I really
marry, do you suppose I am going to have any one but you for my best
man?"

Lamberti listened to this long speech without attempting to interrupt
Guido. Then he was silent for a few moments.

"If you put it in that light," he said, rising to go, "I cannot refuse.
What time shall you start? I will come here for you."

"Thank you," said Guido. "I should like to get there early. At four
o'clock, I should say. I suppose we ought not to leave here later than
half-past three."

"Very well. I shall be here in plenty of time. Good night."

When Guido pressed his hand, it was icy cold.




                              CHAPTER VIII


On the following morning Lamberti went out early, and before nine
o'clock he was in the private study of a famous physician, who was a
specialist for diseases of the nerves. Lamberti had never seen him and
had not asked for an appointment, for the simple reason that his visit
was spontaneous and unpremeditated. He had spent a wretched night, and
it suddenly struck him that he might be ill. As he had never been ill in
his life except from two or three wounds got in fight, he had been slow
to admit that anything could be wrong with his physical condition. But
it was possible. The strongest men sometimes fell ill unaccountably. A
good doctor would see the truth at a glance.

The specialist was a young man, squarely built, with a fresh complexion,
smooth brown hair, and a well-trimmed chestnut beard. At first sight, no
one would have noticed anything remarkable in his appearance, except,
perhaps, that he had unusually bright blue eyes, which had a fixed look
when he spoke earnestly.

"I am a naval officer," said Lamberti, as he took the seat the doctor
offered him. "Can you tell me whether I am ill or not? I mean, whether I
have any bodily illness. Then I will explain what brings me."

The doctor looked at him keenly a few seconds, felt his pulse, pressed
one ear on his waistcoat to listen to his heart, and then against his
back, made him face the light and gently drew down the lower lids of his
eyes, and finally stood off and made a sort of general survey of his
appearance. Then he made him stretch out one hand, with the fingers
spread out. There was not the least tremor. Last of all, he asked him to
shut his eyes tightly and walk slowly across the room, turn round, and
walk back. Lamberti did so, steadily and quietly.

"There is nothing wrong with your body," said the doctor, sitting down.
"Before you tell me why you come here, I should like to know one thing
more. Do you come of sound and healthy people?"

"Yes. My father is the Marchese Lamberti. My brothers and sisters are
all alive and well. So far as I know, there was never any insanity in my
family."

"Were your father and mother cousins?" enquired the doctor.

"No."

"Very good. That is all I need to know. I am at your service. What is
the matter?"

"If we lived in the Middle Ages," said Lamberti, "I should say that I
was possessed by the devil, or haunted." He stopped and laughed oddly.

"Why not say so now?" asked the doctor. "The names of things do not
matter in the least. Let us say that you are haunted, if that describes
what troubles you. Very good. What haunts you?"

"A young girl," Lamberti answered, after a moment's pause.

"Do you mean that you see, or think you see, the apparition of a young
girl who is dead?"

"She is alive, but I have only met her once. That is the strange thing
about it, or, at least, the beginning of the strange thing. Of course it
is perfectly absurd, but when I first saw her, the only time we met, I
had the sensation of recognising some one I had not seen for many years.
As she is only just eighteen, that is impossible."

"Excuse me, my dear sir, nothing is impossible. Every one is
absent-minded sometimes. You may have seen the young lady in the street,
or at the theatre. You may have stared at her quite unconsciously while
you were thinking of something else, and her features may have so
impressed themselves upon your memory, without your knowing it, that you
actually recognised her when you met her in a drawing-room."

"I daresay," admitted Lamberti, indifferently. "But that is no reason
why I should dream of her every night."

"I am not sure. It might be a reason. Such things happen."

"And every night when I wake from the dream, I hear some one close the
door of my room softly, as if she were just going out. I always lock my
door at night."

"Perhaps it sometimes shakes a little in the frame."

"It began at home. But I have been stopping in the country nearly a
fortnight, and the same thing has happened every night."

"You dream it. One may get the habit of dreaming the same dream every
time one sleeps."

"It is not always the same dream, though the door is always closed
softly when she goes away. But there is something else. I was wrong in
saying that I only met the lady once. I should have said that I have
spoken with her only once. This is how it happened."

Lamberti told the doctor the story of his meeting Cecilia at the house
of the Vestals. The specialist listened attentively, for he was already
convinced that Lamberti was a man of solid reason and practical good
sense, probably the victim of a series of coincidences that had made a
strong impression on his mind. When Lamberti paused, there was a
moment's silence.

"What do you yourself think was the cause of the lady's fright?" asked
the doctor at last.

"I believe that she had dreamed the same dream," Lamberti answered
without hesitation.

"What makes you believe anything so improbable?"

"Well--I hardly know. It is an impression. It was all so amazingly real,
you see, and when our eyes met, she looked as if she knew exactly what
would happen if she did not run away--exactly what had happened in the
dream."

"That was on the morning after you had first dreamt it, you say. Of
course it helped very much to strengthen the impression the dream had
made, and it is not at all surprising that the dream should have come
again. You know as well as I, that a dream which seems to last hours
really passes in a second, perhaps in no time at all. The slightest
sound in your room which suggested the closing of a door would be enough
to bring it all back before you were awake, and the sound might still be
audible to you."

"Possibly. Whatever it is, I wish to get rid of it."

"It may be merely coincidence," the doctor said. "I think it is. But I
do not exclude the theory that two people who have made a very strong
impression one on another, may be the subjects of some sort of mutual
thought transference. We know very little about those things. Some queer
cases come under my observation, but my patients are never sound and
sane men like you. What I should like to know is, why did the lady run
away?"

"That is probably the one thing I can never find out," Lamberti
answered.

"There is a very simple way. Ask her." The doctor smiled. "Is it so very
hard?" he enquired, as Lamberti looked at him in surprise. "I take it
for granted that you can find some opportunity of seeing her in a
drawing-room, where she cannot fly from you, and will not do anything to
attract attention. What could be more natural than that you should ask
her quite frankly why she was so frightened the other day? I do not see
how she could possibly be offended. Do you? When you ask her, you need
not seem too serious, as if you attached a great deal of importance to
what she had done."

"I certainly could try it," said Lamberti thoughtfully. "I shall see her
to-day."

"She may try to avoid you, because she is ashamed of what she did. But
if I were you, I would not let the chance slip. If you succeed in
talking to her for a few minutes, and break the ice, I can almost
promise that you will also break the habit of this dream that annoys
you. Will you make the attempt? It seems to me by far the wisest and
most sensible remedy, for I am nearly sure that it will turn out to be
one."

"I daresay you are right. Is there any other way of curing such habits
of the mind?"

"I could hypnotise you and stop your dreaming by suggestion."

"Nobody could make me sleep against my will." Lamberti laughed at the
mere idea.

"No," answered the doctor, "but it would not be against your will, if
you submitted to it as a cure. However, try the simpler plan first, and
come and see me in a day or two. You seem to hesitate. Perhaps you have
some reason for not wishing to make the nearer acquaintance of the lady.
That is your affair, but one more interview of a few minutes will not
make much difference, as your health is at stake. You are under a mental
strain altogether out of proportion with the cause that produces it, and
the longer you allow it to last the stronger the reaction will be, when
it comes."

"I have no good reason for not knowing her better," Lamberti said after
a moment's thought, for he was convinced against his previous
determination. "I will take your advice, and then I will come and see
you again."

He took his leave and went out into the bright morning air. It was a
relief to feel that he had been brought to a determination at last, and
he knew that it was a sensible one, from any ordinary point of view, and
that his one great objection to acting upon it had no logical value.

But the objection subsisted, though he had made up his mind to override
it. It was out of the question that he could really be in love with
Cecilia Palladio, who was probably quite unlike what she seemed to be in
his dreams. He had fallen in love with a fancy, a shadow, an unreal
image that haunted him as soon as he closed his eyes; but when he was
wide awake and busy with life the girl was nothing to him but a mere
acquaintance. His pulse would not beat as fast when he met her that very
afternoon as it had done just now, in the doctor's study, when he had
been thinking of the vision.

Besides, what Guido had said was quite true. He could not possibly
continue not to know Guido's future wife; and as there was no danger of
his falling in love with her when his eyes were open, he really could
not see why he should be so anxious to avoid her. So the matter was
settled. He took a long walk, far out of Porta San Giovanni, and turned
to the right by the road that leads through the fields to the tomb of
Cecilia Metella.

As he passed the great round monument, swinging along steadily, its name
naturally came to his mind, and it occurred to him for the first time
that Cecilia had been a noble name among the old Romans, that it had
come down unchanged, and that there had doubtless been more than one
Vestal Virgin who had borne it. The Vestal in his dream was certainly
called Cecilia. He was in the humour, now, to smile at what he called
his own folly, and as he strode along he almost laughed aloud. Before
the sun should set, the whole matter would be definitely at rest, and he
would be wondering how he could ever have been foolish enough to attach
any importance to it. He followed the Appian Way back to the city, with
a light heart.




                               CHAPTER IX


The Villa Madama was probably never inhabited, for it was certainly
never quite finished, and the grand staircase was not rebuilt after
Cardinal Pompeo Colonna set fire to the house. That was in the wild days
when Rome was sacked by the Constable of Bourbon's Spaniards and
Franzperg's Germans, and Pope Clement the Seventh was shut up in the
stronghold of Sant' Angelo; and at nightfall he looked from the windows
of the fortress and saw the flames shoot up on the slope of Monte Mario,
from the beautiful place which Raphael of Urbino had designed for him,
and which Giovanni of Udine had decorated, and he told those who were
with him that Cardinal Colonna was revenging himself for his castles
sacked and burned by the Pope's orders.

That was nearly four hundred years ago, and the great exterior staircase
was never rebuilt; but in order to save that part of the little palace
from ruin unsightly arches were reared up against the once beautiful
wing, and because of Giulio Romano's frescoes and Giovanni of Udine's
marvellous stucco work, the roof has been always kept in good repair.
Moreover, a good deal has been written about the building, some of which
is inaccurate, to say the least; as, for instance, that one may see the
dome of Saint Peter's from the windows, whereas the villa stands halfway
down the slope of the hill on the side which is away from the church,
and looks towards the Sabines and towards Tivoli and Frascati.

Those who have taken the trouble to visit the villa in its half-ruinous
condition, and who have lingered on the grass-grown terraces and at the
noble windows, on spring afternoons, when the sun is behind the hill,
can easily guess what it became when it passed into the ownership of the
Contessina Cecilia Palladio. Her guardian, the excellent Baron Goldbirn,
had bought it for her because it was offered for sale at a low price,
and was an excellent investment as well as a treasure of art; and he had
purposed to coat the brown stone walls with fresh stucco, to erect a
"belvedere" with nice green blinds on the roof, to hang the rooms with
rich magenta damask, to carpet them with Brussels carpets, to furnish
them with gilt furniture, to warm the house with steam heat, and to
light it with electricity.

To his surprise, his ward rejected each of these proposals in detail and
all of them generally, and declared that since the villa was hers she
could deal with it according to her own taste, which, she maintained,
was better than Goldbirn's. The latter answered that as he was
sixty-five years old and Cecilia was only eighteen, this was impossible;
but that under the circumstances he washed his hands of the matter, only
warning her that the Italian law would not allow her to cut down the
trees more than once in nine years.

"As if anything could induce me to cut them down at all!" Cecilia
answered indignantly. "There are few enough as it is!"

"My dear," the Countess had answered with admirable relevancy, "I hope
you are not ungrateful to your guardian."

Cecilia was not ungrateful, but she had her own way, for it was
preordained that she generally should, and it was well for the Villa
Madama that it was so. She only asked her guardian how much he would
allow her to spend on the place, and then, to his amazement and
satisfaction, she only spent half the sum he named. She easily persuaded
a good artist, whom her stepfather had helped at the beginning of his
career, to take charge of the work, and it was carried out with loving
and reverent taste. The wilderness of sloping land became a garden, the
beautiful "court of honour" was so skilfully restored with old stone and
brick that the restoration could hardly be detected, the great exterior
staircase was rebuilt, the close garden on the other side was made a
carpet of flowers; the water that gushed abundantly from a deep spring
in the hillside poured into an old fountain bought from the remains of a
villa in the Campagna, and then, below, filled the vast square basin
that already existed, and thence it was distributed through the lower
grounds. There were roses everywhere, already beginning to climb, and
the scent of a few young orange trees in blossom mingled delicately with
the odour of the flowers. Within the house the floor of the great hall
was paved with plain white tiles, and up to the cornice and between the
marvellous pilasters the bare walls were hung with coarse linen woven in
simple and tasteful patterns and in subdued colours.

The little gods and goddesses and the emblematic figures of the seasons
in the glorious vaults overhead, smiled down upon such a scene as had
not rejoiced the great hall for centuries. The Countess had asked all
Rome to come, with an admirable indifference to political parties and
social discords; and all Rome came, as it sometimes does, in the best of
tempers with itself and with its hostess. Roman society is good to look
at, when it is gathered together in such ways; for mere looks, there is
perhaps nothing better in all Europe, except in England. The French are
more brilliant, no doubt, for their women, and, alas, their men also,
affect a greater variety of dress and ornament than any other people.
German society is magnificent with military uniforms, Austrians
generally have very perfect taste; and so on, to each its own advantage.
But the Romans have something of their own, a beauty most distinctly
theirs, a sort of distinction that is genuine and unaffected, but which
nevertheless seems to belong to more splendid times than ours. When the
women are beautiful, and they often are, they are like the pictures in
their own galleries; among the men there are heads and faces that remind
one of Lionardo da Vinci, of Cæsar Borgia, of Lorenzo de' Medici, of
Guidarello Guidarelli, even of Michelangelo. Romans, at their best, have
about them a grave suavity, or a suave gravity, that is a charm in
itself, with a perfect self-possession which is the very opposite of
arrogance; when they laugh, their mirth is real, though a little
subdued; when they are grave, they do not look dull; when they are in
deep earnest, they are not theatrical.

Those who went to the Fortiguerra garden party never quite forgot the
impression they received. It was one of those events that are remembered
as memorable social successes, and spoken of after many years. It was
unlike anything that had ever been done in Rome before, unlike the
solemn receptions of the chief of the clericals, when the cardinals come
in state and are escorted by torch-bearers from their carriages to the
entrance of the great drawing-room, and back again when they go away;
unlike the supremely magnificent balls in honour of the foreign
sovereigns who occasionally spend a week in Rome, and are amusingly
ready to accept the hospitality of Roman princes; most of all, it was
unlike an ordinary garden party, because the Villa Madama is quite
unlike ordinary villas.

Moreover, every one was pleased that such very rich people should not
attempt to surprise society by vulgar display. There were no state
liveries, there were no ostentatious armorial bearings, there was no
overpowering show of silver and gold, there was no Hungarian band
brought expressly from Vienna, nor any fashionable pianist paid to play
about five thousand notes at about a franc apiece, to the great
annoyance of all the people who preferred conversation to music.
Everything was simple, everything was good, everything was beautiful,
from the entrancing view of Rome beyond the yellow river, and of the
undulating Campagna beyond, with the soft hills in the far distance, to
the lovely flowers in the garden; from the flowers without, to the
stately halls within; from their charming frescoes and exquisite white
traceries, to the lovely girl who was the centre, and the reason, and
the soul of it all.

Her mother received the guests out of doors, in the close garden, and
thirty or forty people were already there when Guido d'Este and Lamberti
arrived; for every one came early, fe

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