'Why did you want us to have this Home Minister's place?' And her voice trembled with restrained feeling.
Don Silvio returned with overcoat and hat, rolling the extinguished stump of his Tuscan cigar between his lips, his secretary following, with a portfolio full of papers.
'Would you like a rose?' said Angelica to her husband, on the spur of the moment, offering to put one in his buttonhole.
'What can you be thinking of!' he cried, repelling the white hand with a certain degree of roughness. 'Do you want the Opposition to quizz me? A Minister with a rose! I should become the subject of caricatures in the newspapers at once!'
Donna Angelica timidly drew back, casting a furtive glance at Sangiorgio. But she did not give him the rose.
* * * * *
A low sky, with gray, leaden, heavy clouds, becoming black on the horizon, over the Tusculan hills, on Soratte, which itself might have been a great cloud settled down upon the earth; the Campagna bare and wan, undulating in places as though heaving up its inwards; two black hedges, two prickly scant hedges, without a sign of green, without a blossom; a tavern, with a rude depiction on the damp wall of three black decanters standing on a triangle and a girl drinking wine, but with doors and windows barred by decayed wooden shutters; the large gray building where the widow Mangani gives Roman summer and autumn holiday-makers tripe in sauce to eat on a terrace, in an arbour, or in a small yard, where there is room for a table and a pint of white wine; the curious ruin, alone in a field, which bears the semblance of a gigantic armchair with a chipped back, and which in fact is known as the Devil's Chair; a carter lying dozing, face down, on a load of volcano ashes he was bringing into Rome; an occasional fat drop of rain that fell upon the ground; this side St. Agnes' a Cardinal's carriage returning leisurely from the Catacombs, and a few priests walking on both sides of the road; immediately beyond St. Agnes' two carabineers sitting rigid on horseback, wrapped up in their dark cloaks; a gentle, mild breeze that swept the earth; a pungent smell, the peculiar smell of the Roman Campagna, which goes to the brain, and from the brain goes into the system like an insidious miasma; a strange dog, all muddy, that went sniffing along the hedges and looked at every wayfarer with sad, unhappy eyes—these were the things, people, animals, surroundings, seen by Francesco Sangiorgio, towards the close of a winter's day, in the Via Nomentana. And over all things, animals, houses, churches, hung the deep gloom of the imminent rainstorm, the tremendous gloom of a Roman sunset in the Campagna.
'Here is the Ponte Nomentana,' said the coachman, pointing to it with his whip.
'Stop; I wish to get out. And wait for me here,' said Sangiorgio.
He walked up the little slope to the bridge, the strange walled bridge, whose broad, graceful arch curves over the gurgling waters of the Aniene, with two large casements facing up stream and down. Sangiorgio stood on the bridge, and, leaning on a ledge, looked into the distance whence the river came.