However, she was happy, happy in her freedom, her health, her life. After the few first delicious walks on Antonio's arm she began to go with the nurse and the baby. The mornings were splendid; breaths of perfumed wind gave stimulating sweetness to the air; bands of shining silver furrowed the luminous heights of the heaven.
How different from the spring of a year ago! Now Regina felt impulses of tenderness for everything and everybody. The warm surging of that breeze which came from the summer of the southern plains and passed on to her northern home still stung by the sharpness of winter, ravished her soul, sending it forth in flight like a bird drunk with light and space.
One day she sallied forth quite alone. She felt like that hero of Dostoievsky's, who, unexpectedly obliged to cross the principal streets of the great city in which he had long lived without attention, seemed to himself born again to a new life. Roaming in the immensity of Via Nazionale, Regina looked about her with childish curiosity. For the first time she perceived that the Hotel Quirinale was a soft grey, while to her it had always seemed mustard colour; she saw the tower of the American Church striped and elegant like a lady's dress; she admired the fine perspective of Via Quattro Fontane; she stood on the sunlit carpet which covered regally the steps of the Exhibition. A red-faced cabman raised two fingers, thinking her a foreigner seeking a carriage; a Moor in European dress passed near her and stared; a flower-girl offered her roses. It was all interesting; but a year ago she would have been annoyed.
She descended Via dei Serpenti, and as she advanced saw the arches of the Colosseum open to the deep sky, and she fancied them huge blue eyes looking at her and full of eternal dream. She found herself alone before the great dead sphinx; only a boy—fair-haired, rosy, dressed in green—was watching the entrance from between two baskets of oranges. The broken columns lying in the sun showed metallic reflections; the voluptuous wind brought whiffs of country fragrance; cries of love-making birds came from the trees of the Palatine; the outline of the trees was soft against the feathery silver clouds which veiled the sky.
Regina descended, almost running. She penetrated under an archway and paused, checked by a sudden chill. A priest passed close to her, black and fluttering, like a melancholy bird. She moved on, opened her guide-book, but did not read. Play of sun and shade painted the background of the Colosseum's immense emptiness. The walls, dotted with wild plants and yellow flowers, suggested a mountain-side; shady corners, green with moss, seemed little damp pastures; mysterious caverns opened great black mouths. Hoarse cawing of rooks came from behind the huge blue eyes which the great sphinx fixed on its own ruin. From the hopeless profundity of heaven rained a dream of solitude and death.
"I have never cared for history," thought Regina. "There are persons who come miles to gush about a stone on which possibly some Roman warrior set his dirty foot! That seems silly to me. Why? A stone is for me only a stone! Nothing speaks to me by its past, but by its present significance. The past is death; the present is life. Here am I, and here once laboured twelve thousand slaves—or how many was it?" (Again she opened the guide-book, but did not read.) "Here the lions devoured the Christians, and cruel eyes of emperors, women, plebeians, with less conscience than the lions, enjoyed the horrid spectacle. But all that is past, and it doesn't move me a bit. Oh, dear! Here come the foreigners, bursting into this dream of death, chattering like ducks in a stagnant pond! Let me escape!"
She went away. The Palatine trees trembled in the breeze against a sky ever brighter and brighter. The campanile of Santa Francesca Romana was clear-cut, bright, and dark. The Arch of Constantine framed the bright picture of the roadway with its background of silvery cloud. Regina followed the road and seated herself on the highest step of the stair of San Gregorio. Everything she could see in front of her, from the pine-trees, noisy with birds, to the rosy vision of the city's edge, all was light, life, joy; behind her, in the damp cloister, green with moss, in the portico guarded by tombs, in the abandoned garden, all was silence, sadness, death. Always the great contrast! Vibrating with life, she nevertheless entered into that place of death and allowed herself to be taken round by a friar, who seemed a skeleton wrapped in a yellow tunic. They visited the chapels, in whose silence the beautiful figures of Domenichino and Guido grow pale, like persons condemned to solitude. Regina crossed the desolate garden and watched the friar, with profound pity, wondering he could still walk, though he was dead to life.
She thought of her baby, the little Caterina. Ah! she should be taught to appreciate, to enjoy, to adore life!