“It looks Plutonian,” Marion said. “We are, perhaps, on a visit to Proserpine.”
“Speaking of Proserpine reminds, me of pomegranate-seeds,” the Signora said; “and pomegranate-seeds remind me of something I heard very prettily said last summer by a very pretty young lady. We were in Subiaco, and had risen very early in the morning to go up to the church of St. Benedict. I noticed that Lily was very serious and
silent, so did not speak, but only looked at her while we waited a little in the sala for another member of our party. She walked slowly up and down, and seemed to be praying; presently, as if recollecting that we had a difficult climb before us, she seated herself near a table on which a servant had just piled up the fruit she had been buying. Among it was a pomegranate, broken open, and bleeding a drop or two of crimson juice out on to the dark wood. Lily drew a small, pointed leaf from an orange stem, and made a knife of it to separate the grains of the pomegranate, presently lifted one, and then another, and another to her mouth. I only thought how pretty her daintiness was as she absently fed like a bird, when all at once she turned as crimson as the juicy grain she had just eaten, and sprang up from the table, throwing the leaf away, and uttering an exclamation of such distress that I thought she must have been poisoned. Her exclamation was odd: ‘O Pluto!’
“‘You see,’ she explained after a minute, ‘I was saying the rosary, and had finished it, when I caught sight of the fruit here. And I thought then that, though our prayers may be flowers before the throne, our actions are fruits. Then I sat down to look at the pomegranate, and wondered what sort of a good action it was like; and while I wondered, I got tangled in a thicket of similitudes, and wandered off into mythology; and as I divided the grains I remembered poor Proserpine, and how Pluto, who knew well she could not leave him after having eaten, induced her to eat three pomegranate grains. I wondered if they were just like these, and how they tasted to her,
and put one and another in my mouth, imagining myself in her place, and that presently my mother would come seeking me, and want to carry me back to heaven with her, and would find that I could not go because of these same pomegranate seeds. And then, my mind catching on the word Mother, which I had just been repeating on my rosary so many times, I remembered the Mother of God, and began to search for some Christian meaning in the myth. I thought Ceres was the giver of wheat and grain, therefore of bread, and Mary gave us the Bread of Life. Ceres came searching and mourning for her daughter, snatched away by the prince of darkness, and Mary watches and prays over those whom the enemy has snatched away from the garden of God, and who cry out to her for help. Ceres found that her daughter, having tasted of the fruit of the lower regions, was bound to spend one-half of her life there. Before I had time to find a Christian parallel for that part of the story, it flashed over me that my three pomegranate-seeds had cost me heaven for to-day, and deprived me of a privilege I might never have again. O Signora! I was going to receive Communion to-day in the grotto of St. Benedict!’”
“It is not often,” the Signora added, “that one can retrace the wandering path of a reverie as my poor Lily did. Her story reminded me of an illustrated poem, with wheat and roses wreathed around the leaves and hanging in among the verses.”
The bell announcing visitors, they went into the house again, and found Mr. Coleman and Signor Leonardo, the latter having come to see when his pupils would wish to resume their lessons.
“I can assure you, Signor, that I am the only one who has thought of study during the last three days,” Isabel said. “You should commend me. I have faithfully learned an irregular verb every morning while taking my coffee. That is my rule; and it is becoming such a habit with me that the mere sight of a cup and saucer suggests to me an irregular verb. The night we spent at Monte Compatri I learned three, not being able to sleep for the fleas.”
The Italian murmured some inarticulate commendation of her industry, and dropped his eyes. Her perfectly free and off-hand manner confounded him. To his mind such a lack of the downcast reserve of the girls he was accustomed to regard as models of behavior indicated a very strange disposition and an education still more strange. Yet he could not doubt that Miss Vane was respectable.
Mr. Coleman, who was hovering near, begged permission to make a comment, which he would not be thought to intend as a criticism. “You say the night you ‘spent’ at Monte Compatri. Is it, may I ask, true that Americans always speak of spending time? In England we say we pass time. I have heard the peculiarity attributed to your nation, the reason given for it being that Americans are almost always engaged in business of some kind, and naturally use the expressions of trade.”