But the Marchesa declared that she must go home and drag one of her boys, who was studying for an examination, out for exercise. 'Oh! these examinations—they are horrors!' she said, throwing up her hands. 'No—these poor boys!—and they have no games like the English boys. But you were speaking about the war—about our poor Italy?'
She paused. She laid her hand on Lucy's shoulder and looked down into the girl's face. Her eyes became for a moment veiled and misty, as though ghosts passed before them—the grisly calamities and slaughters of the war. Then they cleared and sparkled.
'I tell you, Mademoiselle,' she said slowly, in her difficult picturesque English, 'that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal!—not to be believed! You have taken a hundred years—you!—to make a nation, and you have had a big civil war. Forty years—not quite!—since Cavour died. And all that time Italy has been like that cauldron—you remember?—into which they threw the members of that old man who was to become young. There has been a bubbling, and a fermenting! And the scum has come up—and up. And it comes up still—and the brewing goes on. But in the end the young strong nation will step forth. Now Mr. Manisty—oh! I like Mr. Manisty very well!—but he sees only the ugly gases and the tumult of the cauldron. He has no idea—'
'Oh! Manisty,' said the young Count, flinging away his cigarette; 'he is a poseur of course. His Italian friends don't mind. He has his English fish to fry. Sans cela—!'
He bent forward, staring at Lucy in a boyish absent-mindedness which was no discourtesy, while his hat slipped further down the back of his curly head. His attitude was all careless good-humour; yet one might have felt a touch of southern passion not far off.
'No; his Italian friends don't mind,' said Madame Variani. 'But his English friends should look after him. Everybody should be angry wid som-thin—it is good for the character; but Mr. Manisty is angry wid too many things. That is stupid—that is a waste of time.'
'His book is a blunder,' said Fioravanti with decision. 'By the time it is out, it will look absurd. He says we have become atheists, because we don't let the priests have it all their own way. Bah! we understand these gentry better than he does. Why! my father was all for the advance on Rome—he was a member of the first Government after 1870—he wouldn't give way to the Clericals an inch in what he thought was for the good of the country. But he was the most religious man I ever knew. He never missed any of the old observances in which he had been brought up. He taught us the same. Every Sunday after Mass he read the Gospel for the day to us in Italian, and explained it. And when he was dying he sent for his old parish priest—who used to denounce him from the pulpit and loved him all the same! "And don't make any secret of it!" he said to me. "Bring him in openly—let all the world see. Non crubesco evangelium!"'
The young man stopped—reddened and a little abashed by his own eloquence.
But Madame Variani murmured—still with the same aspect of a shrewd and sleepy cat basking in the sun—
'It is the same with all you Anglo-Saxons. The North will never understand the South—never! You can't understand our à peu près. You think Catholicism is a tyranny—and we must either let the priests oppress us, or throw everything overboard. But it is nothing of the kind. We take what we want of it, and leave the rest. But you!—if you come over to us, that is another matter! You have to swallow it all. You must begin even with Adam and Eve!'