"I'm not a crowned head!"
It was difficult to protest against Mrs. Portheris's regulations, and impossible to contravene them, so I have nothing to report of that guide but his card, which bore the name "Antonio Plicco," and his memory, which is a blank.
There was an ascent, and Mrs. Portheris mounted it proudly. I pointed out to poppa half-way up that his esteemed relative hadn't turned a hair, but he was inclined to be incredulous; said you couldn't tell what was going on in the Department of the Interior. The Senator often uses a political reference to carry him over a delicate allusion. Flowering shrubs and bushes lined the path we climbed, silent in the sunshine, dustily decorative, and at the top the turning of a key let us into a strange place. Always a strange place, however often the guide-books beat their iterations upon it, a place that leaps at imagination, peering into other days through the mists that lie between, and blinds it with a rush of light—the place where they have gathered together what was left of the dead Pompeiians and their world. There they lay before us for our wonderment as they ran, and tripped, and struggled, and fell in the night of that day when they and the gods together were overwhelmed, and they died as they thought in the end of time. And through an open door Vesuvius sent up its eternal gentle woolly curl again the daylight sky, and vineyards throve, and birds sang, and we, who had survived the gods, came curious to look. The figures lay in glass cases, and Dicky remarked, with unusual seriousness, that it was like a dead-house.
"Except," said poppa, "that in this mortuary there isn't ever going to be anybody who can identify the remains. When you come to think of it—that's kind of hard."
"No chance of Christian burial once you get into a museum," said Dick with solicitude.
"I should like," remarked Mrs. Portheris, polishing her pince nez to get a better view of a mother and daughter lying on their faces. "I should like to see the clergyman who would attempt it. These people were heathen, and richly deserved their fate. Richly!"
Momma looked at her husband's Aunt Caroline with indignant scorn. "Do you really think so?" she asked, but we could all see that her words were a very inadequate expression for her emotions. Mrs. Portheris drew all the guns of her orthodoxy into line for battle. "I am surprised——" she began, and then the Senator politely but firmly interfered.
"Ladies," he said, "'De mortuis nisi bonum,' which is to say it isn't customary to slang corpses, especially, as you may say, in their presence. I guess we can all be thankful, anyhow, that heathen nowadays have got a cooler earth to live on," and that for the moment was the end of it, but momma still gazed commiseratingly at the figures, with a suspicious tendency to look for her handkerchief.
"It's too terrible," she said. "We can actually see their features."
"Don't let them get on your nerves, Augusta," suggested poppa.