“However it was then, it happily makes no difference now,” returned Martin. A rising elation filled him—out of the utter unexpectedness of this meeting, out of its picturesqueness, out of the infinity of possibilities which it might promise. He was accordingly amazed at the vehemence with which his companion turned upon him.
“Why do you say that?” she exclaimed. “You who brought me here, and on this day! Have you forgotten the gateway by the river? Now is not the time. The time was when the horseman clattered up the cobble-stones of St. André and into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Chevigny; when Dame Claude seized the packet from the page at the door and ran with it to the secretaire du roi; when he broke the seal, read the first lines of the Abbé Gaetani, went white to the lips, looked at Dame Claude, and turned away. It was then that it made a difference. It was then that nothing else made a difference. Things come, and then other things come. Time is only a chain to hold us to them—or away from them. It is mere chance whether it breaks all at once or by degrees....”
Martin watched her keenly as she spoke, white in the shadow of the cloister, her hair dark against the wan frescoes. There was a curious contrast between the vivid modern figure and those faded images of a life so dim and far away. And recalling the palace gate he wondered what there might be of consistency or inconsistency between what she said so lightly then and what she said so intensely now. And why? Where had she been, what had she done, yesterday, all the other days that went before their chance meeting by the Arno?
She stopped, as if reading in his eyes. She touched the white stone softly.
“Good-bye, poor Achille,” she said—“you and your twenty-six years.”
She did not speak again as they passed on. But at one of the openings into the green quadrangle a sudden impulse seized her. She stepped down into the grass and picked some crimson-tipped daisies growing there. Then she went back and laid them on top of the tablet, adding:
“That is for Dame Claude, who was not here all those years ago to-day.”
III
They sat where they could follow the shining river coils that wound down out of the hills, dived under the red of the city roofs, and wound on again into the iridescent plain. Through the haze of the Maremma the glint of the sea at last began to burn, and out of the north issued ghostly the apparition of the Carrara mountains. The day had somehow flamed away, there in that leaning gallery in the corner of the city wall, where the storied marbles stood alone with their shadows—a little fleet of ships becalmed in a quiet haven of the world.
“I am like the wicked in Scripture,” she said. “I love groves and high places.”