“But after marriage it is like England: you have no restrictions between the friendships of men and women.”
“We have no restrictions as to friendship; but it is not like England, if what the English, who are at the Court—and there are many—say is true.”
Delicacy prompted Will not to question her, and there was a little silence, during which she tried to lift the mosaics out of the broken pattern under their feet with the point of her dainty shoe. Then she looked up and said, “Those friendships are not friendships—they are love affairs. But I wish our friendship to be like your English friendships.”
Will bit his lip, and there was another silence, during which the white horse in the chariot underneath them lost the little black cube which had been his eye for twenty centuries. Seemingly satisfied with her success in this direction, she reiterated, “You will give me your friendship, Signor Vill?”
He gave her his hand.
At that moment we heard My Lady’s voice—“There they are, Cesare: give them their donkeys.”
It had, it appeared, occurred to her fertile mind that the Court of Naples should ride round the excavations on the fine asses which they breed in this part of Italy. The Admiral wished to see everything—no light task in the heat of a Neapolitan October day; and driving was an impossibility in the narrow streets, even if the chariot ruts, a couple of inches deep in the lava paving of the roads, had been the proper space apart for the wheels of the calesses in which we had come from Naples. What then but ride on asses? The Court would take it as a jest, and the Admiral should see all he desired.
The idea, like so many of My Lady’s ideas, proved to be an inspiration. The managing—the difficulty of managing—the strange asses hastily impressed, entertained the empty heads to whom the very antiquities were interesting seen in this lazy manner, and afforded pleasant food for jest. To those who were minded to see, everything Pompejan presented itself now with an added interest. For once the impluvia—the shallow marble ponds set in the centre of the sloping courts—had their complement of water, and all the ingenious devices for conveying the coveted moisture from every surface of the house to the pond in the centre, were at work.
We clattered a little along a street, when we heard My Lady’s clear full voice call out to stop, and those who would to dismount. The Admiral, for all his one arm, was off his ass before any one else, and helping My Lady to dismount, and enter a house of a better kind, which by the traces of mould still left could not have been so long unearthed.
The statues of little Amoretti were still on a little marble island in the centre of the pool, and there were a pair of marble shafts with the heads and shoulders of satyrs standing in the court. My Lady hurried us into a sequence of small chambers, no larger than the chambers made in the thickness of the walls of ancient English castles, which were painted in bright colours with borders of flowers, and had groups of animals masking as human beings for their centres. A grasshopper driving a kind of buggy with a parrot for his steed was very quaint: I had not thought that the Romans knew of parrots.