“The principal dénoûment so overflowed and hid him out of sight that I did not ask, or have forgotten,” the Signora said. “Girls, what should have been done to the man who made the relic? Isabel?”
“He should have been at sea again in that very ship, at the time of the miraculous cure,” Isabel said. “He should have been standing by the very mast he had cut the bit out of, and a flash of lightning should have struck him dead.”
“Oh! no, Bella,” said her sister. “He should have been standing by the possessed man when he was cured, and should have been stricken with compunction, and should have confessed, and been forgiven, and been, for all the rest of his life, a model of faith and reverence.”
“Suppose,” Mr. Vane suggested, “that we should choose a medium between extreme justice and extreme charity, and say that the devil which left the possessed man entered immediately into that Eastern traveller, and tormented him by taking him on constant voyages to Jerusalem, swinging him to and fro like a pendulum, always in the same ship, till at last, after many years, his victim was enabled to make an act of perfect faith in the power and mercy of the God crucified, and so be freed from his tormentor.”
Meantime, Mr. Coleman approached Miss Warder, timid but admiring, much as one might approach a beautiful panther, and seated himself on the edge of a chair near her.
“You like Rome?” he inquired in a conciliating voice, not meaning
anything whatever by the question, except to open a conversation. That was always the first thing he said to a foreigner.
The bright, laughing eyes of the girl flashed over him in one scathing glance. “It’s charming!” she said with enthusiasm. “One can ask so many questions here without being thought inquisitive. To be sure, one doesn’t always get answers to them. I asked to-day a very accomplished Monsignore the meaning of the broken arch that one sees over nearly all the altars, and he couldn’t tell me. May be you can.”
Mr. Coleman believed that it was an architectural corruption that came in with the decline of art, but could not be positive.
“I wouldn’t mind so much,” she went on, “if only they did not set on the sides of it a hu—an inhuman being, who would naturally be sure to slide off if he weren’t nailed on, as, indeed, he is. It makes one feel uncomfortable!”