"Silvia, why do you not go to bed?" Matteo called out: "I hear you up."
"I am going now," she made haste to answer, and in her terror threw herself on the bed without undressing. She wondered if Matteo could hear her heart beat through the wall or see how she was shaking.
The next morning at seven o'clock Silvia and her brother took their seats in the clumsy coach that goes from Monte Compatri to Rome whenever there are passengers enough to fill it, and after confused leavetakings from all but the one she wished most to see they set out. Claudio was invisible. In fact, he had lain on the ground all night beneath her window, and now, hidden in a tree, was watching the winding road for an occasional glimpse of the carriage as it bore his love away.
The peasants of Italy, when they see the Milky Way stretching its wavering, cloudy path across the sky, shining as if made up of the footprints of innumerable saints, say that it is the road to Jerusalem. The road to the New Jerusalem has no such pallid and spiritual glory: its colors are those of life. No death but that of martyrdom, with its rosy blood, waving palm-branch and golden crown, is figured there. Life, and the joy of life, beauty so profuse that it can afford to have a few blemishes like a slatternly Venus, and the dolce far niente of poverty that neither works nor starves,—they lie all along the road.
Silvia was young, and had all her life looked forward to this journey. She could not be quite indifferent. She looked and listened, though all the time her heart was heavy for Claudio. They reached the gate of St. John Lateran just as all the bells began to ring for the noon Angelus, and in fifteen minutes were at the Signora Fantini's door and Silvia in the kind lady's arms. It seemed to the girl that she had found her mother again. That this lady was more gracious, graceful, kind and beautiful than her mother had ever been she would not think. She was simply another mother. And when Matteo had gone away home again, not too soon, and when, after a few days' sightseeing, the signora, suspecting that the continued sadness of her young guest had some other cause than separation from her brother and sister, sought persistently and artfully to win her secret, Silvia told her all with many tears. She was going to be a nun because her mother had said that she must; and she was willing to be a nun—certainly she was willing. But, for all that, if it could have been so, she would have been so happy with Claudio, and she never should be quite happy without him.
"Then you must not be a nun," the signora said decidedly. "The thing is all wrong. You have no vocation. You should have said all this before."
For already the signora had taken Silvia to see the Superior at Monte Cavallo, who had promised to receive the young novice in three weeks, and had told her what work she could perform in the convent. "You are not strong, I think," she had said, "but you can knit the stockings. All have to work."
And Monsignor Catinari, whose business it was to examine all candidates for the conventual life, had held a long conversation with her and gone away perfectly satisfied.
But when the signora proposed to undo all this, Silvia was wild with terror. No, no, she would be a nun. Her mother had said so, she wished it, and Matteo would kill her if she should refuse.
"Leave it all to me," the signora said, and laid her motherly hand on the trembling little ones held out to her in entreaty. "We will look out for that. Matteo shall not hurt you or Claudio. I am going to send for Monsignor Catinari again, and you must tell him the truth this time. And then we will see what can be done in the case. Don't look so terrified, child. Do you think that Matteo rules the world?"