A Lady of Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

‘He is in Rome,’ she heard her mother say. ‘Gianforte saw him yesterday.’ Gianforte was the Princess’s husband.

‘Do you mean to say he has the courage to——’ began the other.

‘Or the insolence,’ suggested the first.

Then both saw that the girl was listening, and they at once talked of other things. There is an age at which almost every half-grown-up girl is figuratively always at an imaginary keyhole ready to surprise a long-suspected secret, though often innocently unconscious of her own alert curiosity. This seems to have been the attitude of Eve herself when she met the Serpent, and though we are told that Adam was much distressed at the consequences of the interview, there is no mention of any regret or penitence on the part of his more enterprising mate.

So the slim and prim Angelica Campodonico, aged barely seventeen, wondered what Maria Montalto’s story might be, and just then she felt the strongest possible desire to go over to the lemonade booth to tell the pretty Countess confidentially that ‘he’ was in Rome, whoever ‘he’ was, and to see how the lady would behave. Would she think that his coming showed ‘courage’ or ‘insolence’? It was all intensely interesting, and the girl would have been bitterly disappointed if she could have known that within twenty minutes of her going away ‘he’ would actually be present and would have the insolence—or the courage!—to go directly to the Countess of Montalto’s booth and speak to her under the very eyes of society. Unhappily for the satisfaction of Angelica’s curiosity her mother took her away, and it was a long time before she learned the truth about Maria.

The Countess was not alone in her booth; indeed, she could not have done the manual work without a good deal of help, for at times there had been a dozen people standing before her little counter, all impatient and thirsty, and all ready to pay an exorbitant price for even a glass of water, in the name of charity. Therefore she not only had one of her own servants at work, out of sight in the little tent behind her, but several men who were more or less friends of hers had succeeded each other as her assistants during the long afternoon. They belonged to the younger generation of Romans, a set of young men whom their parents certainly never dreamt that they were rearing and whom their grandfathers and grandmothers count with the sons of Belial, largely because they love their country better than the decrepit and forlorn traditions of other days. Forty years ago it would not have occurred to a Roman gentleman to call himself an Italian, but to-day most of his children call themselves Italians first and Romans afterwards, and to these younger ones Italy is a great reality. It is true that Romans have not lost their dislike of the inhabitants of almost all other Italian cities, whether of the south or the north. The Roman dislikes the Neapolitan, the Piedmontese and the Bolognese with small difference of degree, and very much as they and the rest all dislike each other. Italy has its sects, like Christianity, which mostly live on bad terms with each other when forcibly brought together in peaceable private life—like Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and Baptists, not to mention Roman Catholics. But as it is to be hoped that all Christians would unite against an inroad of heathens, so it is quite certain that all Italians would now stand loyally together for their country against any enemy that should try to dismember it. No one who can recall the old time before the unification can help seeing what has been built up. It is a good thing, it is a monument in the history of a race; as it grows, the petty landmarks of past politics disappear in the distance, to be forgotten, or at least forgiven, and the mountain of what Italy has accomplished stands out boldly in the political geography of modern Europe.

Moreover, those who are too young to have helped in the work are nevertheless proud of what has been done; and this is itself a form of patriotism that brings with it the honest and good hope of doing something in the near future not unworthy of what was well done in the recent past.

The young men who helped Maria Montalto to mix lemonade and almond syrup for her stall were of this generation, all between twenty and thirty years old, and mostly of those who follow the line of least resistance from the start of life to the finish. They are all easily amused, because in their hearts they wish to be amused, and for the same reason they are easily bored when there is no amusement at all in the air. They are not bad fellows, they are often good sportsmen, and they are generally not at all vicious. They are not particularly good, it is true, but then they are very far from bad. They have less time for flirting and general mischief than their fathers had, because it now seems to be necessary to spend many hours of each day in a high-speed motor car, which is not conducive to the growth and blooming of the passion flower. It does not promote the development of the intelligence either, but that is a secondary consideration with people who need never know that they have minds. Morally, motoring is probably a good rather than an evil. People who live in constant danger of their lives are usually much more honest and fearless than those who dawdle through an existence of uneventful safety. The soldier in time of peace was the butt and laughing-stock of the ancients in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and of the Greeks, whom those playwrights copied or adapted, but no such contemptuous use has ever been made of the sailor, whose life is in danger half a dozen times in every year.

Oderisio Boccapaduli was squeezing a lemon into a glass for Maria when he saw her hand shake as if it had been struck, and the spoon which she was going to use for putting the powdered sugar into the glass fell from her fingers upon the metal counter with a sharp clatter. Oderisio glanced sideways at her face without interrupting the squeezing of the lemon, and he saw that the characteristic warmth had disappeared all at once from her natural pallor and that her white cheeks looked as cold as if she were in an ague. She was looking down when she took up the spoon again and drew the polished brass sugar-can nearer to her. The young man was quite sure that something had happened to disturb her, and he could only suppose that she felt suddenly tired and ill, or else that some one had appeared in sight not far from the booth, whose presence was unexpected and disagreeable enough to give her a bad shock.

But he knew much more about her than Angelica Campodonico, for he was six-and-twenty, and had been seventeen himself when Maria had married, and nineteen when Montalto had left her; and since he had finished his military service and had been at large in society he had learned pretty much all that could be known about people who belonged to his set. He therefore scrutinised the faces in the near distance, and presently he saw one which he had not seen in Rome for several years; once more he glanced sideways at Maria, and her hand was unsteady as she gave the full glass to a respectable old gentleman who was waiting for it in an attitude of admiration.