After the gloom of the lower, the almost joyous gaiety of the upper church contrasts with it so amazingly that the effect must have been counted upon. Everything is in light delicate harmony. Slender columns of alternate pink and grey; bays roofed with ultramarine dividing others in which Cimabue’s frescoes gleam with strange greens and yellows; choir-stalls with shell-like canopies, lined with blue and gold, surmounting grave tarsia work of saints and angels. There is a small apse with an arcaded gallery, the shafts of pink and grey, and at the back great angels stand on guard. An exquisite small stone pulpit is placed against the wall by the high altar, the column is cut away to give it room, and where it begins again is supported by a grasping hand. Under foot all is pink stone, and round the altar finest cosmatesque mosaic. The lower part of the wall is painted in soft reds and golds to represent looped hangings, and above this, on loveliest blue-green backgrounds, are the Giottos. Noble figures of Cimabue’s look down from the roof; stately angels with red wings tipped with light visit Abraham: the saints’ nimbuses are worked out in raised plaster, the great Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, talk with monks in their cells; all is light, colour, glory; and the windows are large, with delicately stained glass, or, like that at the west, white.
Teresa came up to the others abruptly, and only Mrs Brodrick noticed that her eyes were wet.
“It’s too much,” she said with a quick motion of her hand. “What did they mean? Earth and heaven?—struggle and victory?—the church militant and triumphant?”
“Don’t you like it, Teresa?” asked Sylvia anxiously. “Mr Wilbraham has been telling me so much about it. Did you know that Giotto was a shepherd boy—”
“Was he?” and Teresa, who knew all there is to know about Giotto, shot down from the heights to come to her sister’s help.
“And Cimabue was his master,” went on Sylvia, marshalling her little facts with pride.
“It makes it much more interesting to know about them, doesn’t it?” said the young marchesa, smiling at her, but glancing also at Wilbraham. She need not have feared. His eyes were on Sylvia, he was seeing the young fair face, with its innocent expression, with lips just parted, and reading more than there was, and yet less. What did he care that she should not have Italian painters at her fingers’ ends? He knew them himself, and the knowledge did not seem very valuable. Determination suddenly fired him, and Teresa seeing the look smiled again, this time triumphantly, and turned away.
When they came forth into the piazza, Colonel Maxwell’s fever for “picking up” things broke out.
“It’s absurd to think one can’t find something in a place like this,” he remarked argumentatively. “I shall have a look at some of the side streets. I don’t want to drag any of you, you know.”
“I must go with him,” sighed Mary Maxwell, gathering her dress round her with the air of a martyr,—“in self-defence. I don’t know otherwise what awful things he may bring to me to pack. Don’t anybody else come.”