“I will do what I can, Ion,” Tacita said, beginning to feel as if she had found a brother. “May I speak of it to Dylar? I think that she would show her mind more freely to him.”
“I leave it all to you, and thank you,” the boy said, warmly. “I shall die if I do not go! But don’t tell them that I said so. I have such a longing! Last year I climbed that southern mountain we call the Dome. From the top I caught a glimpse between the higher mountains of the outside world. Oh, how it stretched away! Our plain was as the palm of my hand compared with that vast outspread of land. There were small blue spots, so small that if I held two fingers up at arm’s length, they were hidden. Yet they were mountains like these. There were trees so distant that they looked a mere green leaf dropped on the ground. I saw where the sun rises over the rim of the round earth, and where it sinks again. How I breathed! This is a dear home, I know. I have seen men and women fall on their knees and thank God, weeping with joy, that they were permitted to return after having been long away. But I cannot love San Salvador as it deserves till I have seen something different.”
Tacita took in hers the boy’s trembling hand.
“Be comforted!” she said. “I will do all that I can, and you are sure to go. It will not be long to wait. Now, when you go about, look at San Salvador and all that it contains with the thought that you are taking leave of it. On the eve of saying farewell, even a mere acquaintance seems a friend.”
They were at the door of the Arcade. Ion took a grateful, graceful leave.
“Addio, O Queen of golden Silence!” he said.
“Poor little Leila is dead!” said Elena, coming in later. “I was with her. It was she who gave you the white rose when we were at the school. You can now give one back.”
CHAPTER XIV.
Leila’s funeral took place the next day, the lovely waxen figure carried on a bier strown with flowers. The family surrounded their dead, a procession of friends preceding and following. The child’s home had been in one of the smaller apartments of the cross-streets, reached by stairways under the arches; and as it was the custom for funerals to approach the Basilica by the avenue, they came across to the eastward through alternating light and shadow, and, reaching the outer street, returned by the bridge in front of the Arcade, the bells ringing à morto as they passed through the avenue. But it was not the clash of all the bells together. It was a plaintive dropping, a tone or a chord, like dropping tears.
“Will they not enter?” Tacita asked in a whisper of Elena when she saw that not only those preceding the dead spread themselves around the outside of the inclosure of the Basilica, but those who followed were also remaining outside.