"Come on, Nalduccio," said Peppino, shaking him by the arm, "what on earth is the matter? You look as if you had seen the Lupo Manaro."
"I wish it would catch him," growled Rinaldo, turning to his friends with such an expression that they drew back from him in horror. "May he and all his best dead be the werewolf's food forever. No, I shall not come to the river. The sight of that antipatico Professor of yours has upset me. It will be more prudent to go home and take a dose of medicine than to go for a cold swim after such an emotion."
"Is it as bad as that?" inquired Peppino with affectionate concern. "Poveraccio, perhaps he has the evil eye?" and he fingered the coral horn on his watch chain as he pronounced the fatal word. "If so, why, I think I will come with you. This meeting might bring us bad luck on the river. It is a Friday, too. Yes, I will go back with you, Rinaldo."
"Stuff and nonsense!" exclaimed the third member of the party, the irreverent student who had drawn attention to Bianchi; "I and thirty others have been attending his lectures for the last year, and nothing has happened to us. He is as ugly as hungry, and as tiresome as the Latin in a sermon, but as for the other thing, I never heard that he was accused of it. What a couple of superstitious young donkeys you are!"
"That is all very well," retorted Peppino, "but when the mere sight of a man makes such an impression as that—are you feeling worse, Nalduccio?" he inquired hastily, seeing the artist's face screwing itself up into a frightful grimace—"it is folly, even impiety, to disregard it. Come along, Rinaldo, we will stop at the apothecary's and get him to prescribe for you, and I will come and sit with you till you feel better."
CHAPTER XIII
The Professor had a delightful hour with Cardinal Cestaldini, an hour during which personal preoccupations ceased to exist. The Cardinal, indeed, never seemed to have any of these; his bland, benevolent, well-ordered existence left no loophole for worry, the cipher word which expresses in five letters regrets for the past, irritation in the present, and anxiety concerning the future. Whatever the occupation of the moment might be, he came to it gladly and preparedly, knew that it was either obligatory or legitimate, and turned from it to the next without haste, without delay, without a jarring note in the harmonious modulations by which his spirit passed from key to key, from the inner sanctuaries of prayer and contemplation to the apostolic publicity of his sacredotal and hierarchical functions, the fulfillment of every duty as a priest and a prince of the Church; and again from these to the intellectual and artistic enjoyments which provided the recreation necessary to preserve the elasticity of his well-balanced mind.
He enjoyed few things, in a minor way, more than his occasional conversations with Carlo Bianchi. Those were the days when the new archæology was in its infancy, when the ground had been barely broken over the rich depths of the second Rome, although its more visible remains everywhere met the eye, built into palace and basilica or standing up in sun-stained beauty of colonnade and temple, amphitheater or triumphal arch. The first Rome lay still buried, still undreamed of, far beneath the second, in its cerement of soil, so closely spaded in by time that it served to bear the enormous weight of the Imperial city, which in its turn supported Roma Terza, the Rome of the middle ages and the popes. And every particle of that fine black soil had been soaked in blood whirled by tempest, fused by fire; had incorporated with itself uncounted thousands of human bodies, falling like living grain in the swathe of the invader, who dropped into it in his turn and was gathered to his enemy, hate to hate, Etruscan to Latin, Latin to Roman, Roman to Barbarian, as Fortune flung the numbers from her ever blood-bright wheel.