"No, American, like you, eh?" Vickers replied.
They talked, and presently the little girl running back into the room spoke to some one: "There is a nice man out there, mother. He says he's American, too." Vickers could not hear what the woman said in reply….
The child made them friends. Mrs. Conry, Vickers learned, was his neighbor's name, and she was taking lessons in singing, preparing herself, he gathered, for professional work,—a widow, he supposed, until he heard the little girl say one day, "when we go home to father,—we are going home, mother, aren't we? Soon?" And when the mother answered something unintelligible, the little girl with a child's subtle tact was silent….
This woman standing there on the balcony above the city,—all gold and white and black, save for the gray eyes, the curving lines of her supple body,—this was what he saw of Europe,—all outside those vivid Roman weeks that he shared with her fading into a vague background. Together they tasted the city,—its sunny climbing streets, its white squares, and dark churches, the fields beyond the Colosseum, the green Campagna, the vivid mornings, the windless moonlight nights! All without this marvellous circle, this charmed being of Rome, had the formlessness of a distant planet. Here life began and closed, and neither wished to know what the other had been in the world behind.
That she was from some Southern state,—"a little tiny place near the Gulf, far from every civilized thing," Mrs. Conry told him; and it was plain enough that she was meagrely educated,—there had been few advantages in that "tiny place." But her sensuous temperament was now absorbing all that it touched. Rome meant little to her beyond the day's charm, the music it made in her heart; while the man vibrated to every association, every memory of the laden city….
Thus the days and weeks slipped by until the gathering heat warned them of the passing of time. One June day that promised to be fresh and cool they walked through the woods above the lake of Albano. Stacia Conry hummed the words of a song that Vickers had written and set to music, one of a cycle they had planned for her to sing—the Songs of the Cities. This was the song of Rome, and in it Vickers had embedded the sad strain that the girl sang coming up the street,—the cry of the past.
"That is too high for me," she said, breaking off. "And it is melancholy. I hate sad things. It reminds me of that desolate place at the end of the earth where I came from."
"All the purest music has a strain of sadness," Vickers protested.
"No, no; it has longing, passion! … I escaped!" She looked down on the cuplike lake, shimmering in the sun below. "I knew in my heart that this lived, this world of sunshine and beauty and joy. I thirsted for it. Now I drink it!"
She turned on him her gray eyes, which were cool in spite of her emotion. She had begun again the song in a lower key, when at a turn in the path they came upon a little wooden shrine, one of those wayside altars still left in a land where religion has been life. Before the weather-stained blue-and-red madonna knelt a strangely mediaeval figure,—a man wasted and bare-headed, with long hair falling matted over his eyes. An old sheepskin coat came to his bare knees. Dirty, forlorn, leaning wearily on his pilgrim's staff, the man was praying before the shrine, his lips moving silently.