When there was nothing else to be done he was ready to attend them--of course, under the charge of some older lady--to see galleries and churches, Polyxena had a way, that was highly characteristic, of rushing past the greatest works with her nose in the air and laughing as she repeated some imbecile remark that she had overheard, or pointed out some eccentricity of tourist costume. Nini took art more seriously, looked carefully at everything by the catalogue, and even kept a diary. Xena was commonly thought the handsomer and the more brilliant of the sisters, and Sempaly apparently devoted himself chiefly to her, but he decidedly liked Nini best. The hours that he did not spend with his cousins he passed at the club, where he gambled away large sums. Meanwhile, he was looking very ill and complained of a return of old Roman fever.
And what did the world say to his behavior? The phlegmatic Italians did not trouble themselves about the matter; Madame de Gandry and Mrs. Ferguson laughed over it; Siegburg pronounced it disgraceful, and Ilsenbergh called it bad taste to say the least. That he ought to have arranged to leave Rome everybody agreed. Princess Vulpini held long and lamentable conferences with General von Klinger--reproaching herself bitterly for not having seen the position of affairs long ago--but she had never attached any importance to Sempaly's marked attentions, having had no eyes for anything but Siegburg's devotion to Zinka, and she had taken a quite motherly interest in what she regarded as a good match for both.
Truyn was perfectly furious with Sempaly. All that he was to Zinka during these weeks can only be divined by those who have passed through such a time of grief and humiliation, with the consciousness of having a high-souled and tender friend in the back-ground. He was the only person who never aggravated her wound. He had the gentle touch, the delicate skill, which the best man or woman can only acquire through the ordeal of an aching heart. He came every afternoon with his little girl to take Zinka for a walk, for he knew that the regular drive on the Corso could only bring her added pain; and while the baroness, with outspread skirts, drove in the wake of fashion up to the Villa Borghese and the Pincio, these three--with the general, not unfrequently, for a fourth--would wander through silent and deserted cloisters or take long walks across the Campagna. Not once did Truyn bring a secret tear to her eye; if some accidental remark or association brought the hot color to her thin cheek he could always turn the subject so as to spare her.
One sultry afternoon, late in spring, Truyn and his two daughters--as he was wont to call Zinka and Gabrielle--with the soldier-artist were sauntering home, after a long walk, through the sombre and picturesque streets that surround the Pantheon. The neighborhood is humble and wretched, but over a garden wall rose a mulberry tree in whose green branches a blackbird was singing, and a few red geraniums blazed behind rusty window-bars, bright specks in the monotonous brown; above the roofs bent the deep blue sky; the air was heavy and hot, and full of obscure smells of gutters and stale vegetables. Somewhere, in an upstairs room, a woman sang a love-song of melancholy longing. Suddenly the blackbird and the woman ceased singing at the same time; a dismal howl and groan echoed through the street, and a mass of black shadows darkened the scene. Zinka, who had lately become excessively nervous, started and shuddered.
"It is nothing--only a funeral," Truyn explained, taking off his hat.
That was all--a Roman funeral, grim but picturesque--a long procession of mysteriously-shrouded figures, only able to see through two slits in the sack-like cowls that covered their heads, ropes round their waists, and torches or mystical banners in their hands--banners with the emblems of death. These were followed by a troop of barefooted friars, and last came the bier covered with a bright yellow pall, carried by four more of the shrouded figures, who bent under its weight as they shuffled along. The ruddy flare and the black smoke wreaths, the groan-like chant, the uncanny glitter of the men's eyes out of the formless hoods--ghastly, ghostly, and exhaling a savor of mouldiness and incense, like the resurrection of a fragment of the middle ages--the procession defiled through the narrow street. Zinka, half-fainting, clung to Truyn; Gabrielle, whose childish nerves were less shocked, watched them with intense curiosity and began to question a woman who stood near her in the crowd that had collected, in her fluent, bungling Italian:
"Who is it they are burying?" she asked at length.
"A woman," was the answer.
"Was she young?"
"Si."