When they reached the station there was yet a little time to wait, and they stood in the western windows and looked off to the distant ridges that showed their dark edges against intervening layers of silvery mist. They were ridges of jewels, marked thickly with spires, towers, and palaces. At the left the dome of the world’s temple was visible, making everything else of its sort puny, and next it, like the outline of a forest against the sky, the Quirinal
stretched its royal front. All floated in that delicate mist that, from the distance, always veils the Campagna, as if the innumerable ghosts of the past became luminous when so seen, evading for ever the nearer spectator.
Framing this distant picture, a hill of olives at one side of the station-house sloped to a hill of vines at the other, and the railroad track, set in roses, curved round in the narrow strip of land between them.
The Signora, putting her arm around Bianca, and pointing to one of these ridges, whispered in her ear: “What does my darling think that is—the two dark spots shaped like two thimbles, and about as large, and the something that might be a lead-pencil standing up between them? What blessed campanile and twin cupole do you wish them to be?”
“Oh! I was searching for them,” the girl exclaimed, and kissed her hand to the far-away basilica. “We must go there a few minutes this evening,” she added—“go up the steps, at least, if it should be too late to go in.”
They started, and went trailing along through the enchanted land, happy to return to the city that already seemed to them like home, and, having learnt some landmarks in their outward passage, added to the number of their acquisitions in returning. The Signora indicated the principal tombs and named the aqueducts. “There are the Claudian and Marcian, side by side, galloping over the plain like a pair of coursers, each bringing a lake in its veins to quench the thirst of Rome. Sixtus V., who built our chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, Bianca, used those Claudian arches to bring a new stream in when the old one failed. It is called Aqua
Felice. His name was Felice Peretti.”
“Stia felice!” said Bianca, smiling at the grand old arches.
“In what a circle water goes,” she added after a moment, “and what a beautiful circle!—down in the rain, running in the river, where the wheel touches the earth, rising on the sunbeams, running in clouds, where the wheel touches the sky, dropping in rain again, and so on round and round.”
“Apropos of Sixtus V.,” the Signora said to Mr. Vane, “see how the church recognizes and rewards merit. It is, in fact, the only true republic. That wonderful man was a swineherd in Montalto when he was a boy, and Cardinal of Montalto when he was a man, and he died one of the most brilliant popes that ever wore the tiara. One cannot help wondering what the boy Felice thought of in those days when he watched the swine, and if ever a vision came to him of kings kneeling to kiss his feet. And, more yet, I wonder what thoughts the mother had of his future when she watched over her sleeping child, or looked after him when he went out to his day’s task. He could not have been so great but that his mother gave the first impulse. One does not gather figs of thistles.”