“You can’t send us off; for you have promised to keep us as long as we stay in Rome,” Isabel said triumphantly. “If you should turn your house into a refuge, you would be doing evil that good may come, by breaking a promise.”
When their guest had gone and they were sitting at supper, the conversation still turned on the Roman poor and their manner of receiving charity, and Mr. Vane expressed his astonishment that so little of servility should be mingled with this constant begging.
“You must remember,” the Signora said, “that the mendicant religious orders have given a sort of dignity to poverty, and, though theirs is of a different kind, the people do not distinguish. Then among the many voluntary poor there are two who are particularly cherished in Rome—Santa Francesca Romana and Blessed Labré. The women sitting at the church-door could tell you, if you should try to shame them, that Santa Francesca once sat at a church-door and begged from early morning till Ave Maria; and the poor who ask you for a centessimo in the street know that Labré went about begging, and in clothes as filthy and ragged as any of theirs. Of course they do not distinguish the motives, and have, many of them, made a Christian virtue an excuse for a miserable vice; but, come si fa? as they would say. We cannot spend our time in arguing with them; and, if we should, it would be time thrown away. They have no comprehension of what we call independence; and they think that the blessings they bestow, and the merit we acquire in giving to them, are worth far more than the paltry copper coin they receive from us, and that we are, in reality, their debtors.”
They hurried their supper a little; for they were going out, and it was already nine o’clock. Before they had risen from the table Marion came in to accompany them, and the carriages were at the door.
This matter of the carriages, and the division of her party in them, simple as it seemed, had given the Signora some thought. She was afraid that some new complication might arise between Marion and Bianca, and wished earnestly that they should come to an understanding
immediately. Nothing appeared to be easier, yet every day was a succession of little obstacles to their speaking together in that accidental privacy which they would naturally prefer. Still, she could not well put them in a carriage together. It would look too pointed. There seemed no other way, then, than to take him in the cab with her, and give the calèche to Mr. Vane and his daughter. That any one should suppose that an attraction was growing up between her and this new friend had never occurred to her mind; yet both Mr. Vane and Bianca saw in every word and act of hers a new proof of it. Any one with eyes could see that Marion and Bianca liked each other particularly, the Signora believed. One had but to watch a few minutes, and it became evident that in company each was always so placed as to see and, if possible, to hear the other; and though one might not detect them looking directly, yet sometimes a glance, passing from one part of the room to another, swooped like a bird, and caught the one object it wished to seize within its ken. Yet Bianca provoked her somewhat. The girl was too serious and gentle, too discouragingly friendly. Why, thought the Signora, with that admirable good sense which we sometimes have when we think for others—why, when two persons are admirably fitted for each other, and everybody is willing, and neither of them can quite set about anything till the matter is decided; and when the gentleman, not to be too abrupt in his proposal, or expose himself to an unnecessary mortification, gives the lady that gentle, questioning glance which says so plainly, “May I speak?”—why, in the name of common sense, should she not drop her
pretty head in token of assent, and allow at least a hint of a smile to encourage him? Echo answered, Why?
The upper air was silver with a late moonrise when they went out, while below the lamps burned goldenly through a velvety darkness. Their own street was quiet; but there was a crowd on Monte Cavallo. The glimpse they caught of the piazza of the Trevi fountain in passing showed it full and bright, and the Corso, when they reached it, was swarming with people and brilliant with lighted shops.
“What contrasts there are in Roman life, even in its most quiet times!” Marion said. “I wonder if any one ever was bored here? I doubt it. How well I remember one day of my last visit, three years ago now! It was a bright February afternoon, and I went out for a walk in the Campagna, and saw the ground covered with flowers, and myriads of birds flying about and singing. Coming back to town out of that verdant quiet, I went to the Corso. It was roaring with the height of the last day of Carnival. It looked as if all the world had gone mad with reckless mirth, and, by a common consent, were pressing to that one spot. It was with difficulty I got across the street, shaking a monkey from one arm, and escaping from the lasso of a huge devil on the other side. A few minutes brought me to the Gesù. There what a scene! The church all in darkness, except the tribune, where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in the midst of a blaze of candles that shone on a crowd of faces all silent and turned toward the altar. Now and then the organ played softly; now and then a quiet figure stole in and found room to kneel where it seemed there
was no room for more. It was so still that every time the heavy curtain lifted there could be heard through the whole church the rattling of the tin boxes of the beggars outside. Half an hour later I reached the Corso again, just in time to see the horses rush by like meteors between two solid walls of men and women. And, lastly, just as the stars were coming out, burst the fairy spectacle of the moccoletti, when the narrow street became like a strip cut out of the live sky, thick with dancing stars, and palpitating with the soft pulses of the Northern Lights, blue, green, rosy, and white. I could have said it was not ten minutes before it was all over and I was walking home through a silent, star-lit night. The next morning at six I went to a church and received the Lenten ashes on my forehead. I do not wonder that Romans are lazy, for their imaginations are so kept on the qui vive that muscular action must necessarily be distasteful. They cannot help regarding life as a festa.”