Anyhow the party had been most successful, and Mr. Fitch might go trotting back to his afternoon’s work with the pleased sense that two very young people had made friends under his and Gina’s auspices. He liked to observe that Maundy and I were making a plan to meet next day, and he blessed our alliance, taking credit for the good thought of acquainting Maundy’s brilliance with my—my what?—my honest and old-fashioned enthusiasm. Gina too was satisfied; she stood at her kitchen-door as we went out, and she cordially invited us to come again. She pointed out that Maundy set me an example with his soutane and his aspiration to the priesthood, and she assured me that I couldn’t do better than to place myself under his guidance; but at the same time she allowed that it wasn’t for all of us to aim so loftily, and perhaps I was wise to be content with a lower standard. She cheerily dismissed us; she had developed these reflections in twenty seconds of farewell. We descended to the street, the three of us, and Mr. Fitch waved his hat as he sped off to his happy labours, and Maundy and I turned away in the direction of his seminary, where it was now time for him to rejoin his black-skirted brethren. I was rather proud to be seen walking beside his sweeping robe and clerical hat; it seemed so intimately Roman. But I found to my surprise that Maundy was quite uneasy and apologetic about it; he hated his uniform, he well understood that a man should feel shy of its company. “If I were you,” he said, twitching his skirt disdainfully, “I should hate to appear in public along with this.” He was an odd jumble of cross-purposes, poor Maundy, and here was another glimpse of his natural mind. He was more of a self-conscious school-boy than ever he was of a musk-scented sonnetteer; but in either character I am afraid, or I hope, that he didn’t fit comfortably into his Roman retreat. I can’t think that the cage was to hold him much longer.
VI. VILLA BORGHESE
WE had planned nothing more enterprising than a stroll in the Villa Borghese; and we wandered freely in the ilex-shade, we inspected the children at play in the grass, we stood awhile to watch the young Roman athletes smiting the ball in their ancestral game, we took another turn beneath the magnificent umbrellas of the pines, we lingered for the finish of a bicycle-race in the great Greek stadium; and I don’t deny that we loitered and strolled and looked for something else to watch because we found it difficult to make an excuse for separating. The fact is that we hadn’t very much to talk about after all, without Mr. Fitch between us to be dazzled. Apart from him we made no very stimulating audience for each other, and we clutched at an interest in the games and the races to cover the bare patches of our conversation.
That very small interest was cracking under the strain when there appeared a fortunate diversion. Maundy, after a pause, had said that the leading bicyclist was a splendid Roman type, which was just what I had said before the pause; and he had remembered this and had hastily suggested another stroll, and I (after a pause) had observed that the park was extraordinarily classic (an earlier remark of Maundy’s); when it chanced that in a green alley we came in sight of an old gentleman seated on a bench, a battered but dignified relic of a man, who faced the prospect mildly and blankly, waiting, as it seemed, till some one should happen to pass by and sweep him up. “There’s old Rossi,” cried Maundy, and he rapidly explained that he had lodged with the old man’s family when he first came to Rome, and he was sorry, but he must stop for a minute—we both jumped at the diversion, a timely one.
We were still a little way off, and as we began to move towards the old man two women appeared, an older and a younger, bearing down upon him from the opposite direction. They were delayed for the moment, as they approached, by their own conversation, which seemed to shoot up into an argument demanding settlement before other matters could be taken in hand. We hung back, Maundy and I, and finally the old man was taken in hand, literally enough, and in a style which suggested that the argument had ended to neither lady’s satisfaction. He apparently needed a good deal of rousing and re-arranging of shawls and wraps, and I noticed that the argument showed signs of beginning again over his heedless head. At length he was brought to his feet, his stick was put in his hand, and the party prepared to set forth. Immediately the two ladies caught sight of us, recognized Maundy and raised a cry of delight. Ah, what a fortunate meeting! They had been arguing in Italian, but they now spoke a free crisp English; they greeted us with much politeness, dropping the old man as one might put down a parcel on a chair. He blinked and subsided upon his bench again, while I was introduced to the ladies—Miss Teresa Shacker (so the name reached me at least) and Miss Berta Rossi; in these terms Maundy referred to them, and they were good enough to express their extreme pleasure in making the acquaintance of his friend.
They quickly took his friend into their confidence; I learned that they were aunt and niece, sister-in-law and daughter of the speechless old bundle on the bench. Aunt and niece were very much alike. Teresa the aunt was tall and spare, with pouched white cheeks, a coil of black hair on which her headgear stood high, and long arms assertively kid-gloved and buttoned and tight. Berta the niece was white with slightly more lustre, black with a little more profusion, gloved and hatted with the same defiance. The loose luxuriant evening flowered around us while Berta and Teresa established their effect; and their effect stood forth, hard and high-lighted as a bit of china, quite eclipsing the lazy sprawl of sun and shadow among the trees. There was an artistic passion in their looks and tones as they wrought. The accidents of a dim old man, a dark grove and an April sunset, fell away from them, were forgotten, and in the cleared space they created a social occasion out of the slender material that we offered, Maundy and I. They found it sufficient, they set to work with lucid determination. Long practice had made them perfect, and the entertainment ran without a hitch. All the talking was theirs; they talked in an antiphon so glib that it must have been rehearsed—only that was impossible, since it fitted the chance of our encounter; so they talked, let me say, with the skill of the old Roman improvisers, who never hesitated for a rhyme on any subject you could set them. Half an hour later I knew a prodigious amount about Teresa and Berta, and I don’t think they knew anything at all about me.
Who were they, and what? Their English dialect, in the first place, was a study by itself. “What a pleasure,” said one of them, “to hear some English speaking!”—and immediately they explained to me that they were “mad for England,” such was their phrase, and that I must talk to them of nothing but England for their pleasure. “For we,” said Teresa, “being English maternally, love to talk our language like anything, and we are both a little wee bit cracked on the head about England”; and Berta put in that they weren’t English, not strictly, but rather Virginian—“Ah,” said Teresa, “but Virginian is most English of all, as you know so well—and you mustn’t come down on us for a couple of Yankee women, no, not at all.” “Yankee, good God!” cried out Berta, “ah no, not a bit of it; our family came of England in the beginning by origin; I ’ope you haven’t thought that we spoke as Americans, so very ogly, all in the nose!” “We are always fewrious at everybody,” said Teresa, “who will believe us American.” “But Mr. Maundy has told you about us—is it true?” asked Berta; and Teresa chimed in with the next versicle, and Berta caught her up with the response, and between them they brought out their history in much profusion of detail and folded me into their family circle with a will.
They bethought themselves of the old man on the bench and proceeded to display him. He was enrolled for the part of a benignant Œdipus, tired at the end of a long day, weighted with his knowledge of the jealousies and vindictive passions of the world, but not embittered by them, only mellowed by many hoary years of patience and fortitude. It was a fine exhibition of patriarchal and republican simplicity. He neither spoke nor moved nor seemed to hear anything that was said, but his attendant maidens gave life to the part on his behalf. The grand old man, survivor of a heroic age—had he been the inspiration of Mazzini, the counsellor of Cavour, Garibaldi’s right hand?—all three perhaps, and anyhow a flaming brand of freedom in the bad days of which we younger folk knew only the eloquent tale. To think of those terrible times of oppression, of persecution and bigotry! This patriot had given all, had sacrificed fortune and strength to the cause of Italy in her woe, when the land lay groaning beneath the yoke of tyrant and priest. But there were traitors even in the camp of enlightenment, and his feelings had suffered the cruelest laceration. His feelings were more to him than any personal hopes or ambitions, so that little need be said of the utter collapse of these also. He had withdrawn from the struggle, had married a wife who was all sympathy, and had passed into a profound retirement. The struggle of poverty was hard; but what is poverty when it is sweetened by the heart’s affections? The poor lady, Teresa’s sister, was dead these many years; she had bequeathed her husband, her two young children, to Teresa’s care. Poor Leonora had had a soul too great for her frame; the artistic inheritance in her blood would not allow her to rest. She was the daughter of an artist, and the fire had descended on her—that fire which had been withheld (perhaps mercifully, who knows?) from Teresa, the younger sister.
Out it all came in a cataract. I kept my head as well as I could, and I glanced with respectful admiration at the bundle of shawls that had borne these historic shocks. But the ladies let him drop once more, having played out his part for him; and they launched into a strophe of which the burden was Leonora, poor Leonora with the fever of art in her veins, and yet so human, a true woman, proud to devote herself to the task of binding the wounds of a hero. Maundy—where was Maundy all this time? He was fidgeting restlessly on the edge of our group, and I judge that the tale of the hero and his bride wasn’t new to him; he now managed to interrupt it with a word to excuse himself, to bid us good-evening and depart. He left me in the hands of Teresa and Berta; I saw them close about me and cut me off from the chance of declaring that I too must be going on my way. Really, these women—they were like famished creatures, rejoicing in the taste of fresh blood; they hadn’t the least intention of resigning the chance. So they found they should like to walk a little further under the trees, to enjoy the evening; it occurred to them both that the evening ought to be enjoyed, for they were passionately fond, they said, of the country.
“You English are all so fond of the country,” said Teresa, “you are such lovers of sporting!” She had meant to say “we English,” but she wasn’t so awkward as to correct herself. She broke off into an ecstasy over the evening sunshine. “I adore,” she cried, “the solitude, the quiet of the country.” The spot where we happened to be pausing was not very countrified; for close to our green alley was an enclosure covered with little chairs and tables, from which there went up a volley of the brilliant chatter of Rome; but it reminded Teresa of the country days to which they always looked forward in the summer, when they went away to the mountains or to the baths. What mountains? Well, they sometimes went to Frascati—“si sta tanto tanto bene in campagna,” exclaimed Teresa without thinking, and she remembered at once that the language into which she dropped without thinking should be English, the native English in which she habitually (she made it clear that she habitually) thought and dreamt. As for the “baths,” they went occasionally to the sea; Berta was the girl for the sea—she would like to walk for miles along the shore, alone with nature, quite out of sight of everybody. “Our Italian friends think me an extraordinary gurl,” she brightly confessed, “as mad as a—as a hunter.” She had a misgiving as she produced this English idiom, but she recovered herself to pick up the next réplique. “We shock our Italian friends jolly well,” she said; “ra-thur!” The last word had an English note that quite reassured her.