Yes, there it was! the crumbling, stately city of the past, looking as if it had just risen from the bottom of the sea, after having been submerged for centuries. It was all a faded gold color, like autumn leaves, and its narrow streets were chilly, as though death had breathed through them. But its heights were warm and sunny, and its dusky trees and hedges were steeped in warmth, and over its magnificent decay the sky was fresh and blue, and the morning sunshine flowed bountifully.
“Now,” said Mrs. Gerald, becoming business-like at once, “we must first engage an apartment, and get our luggage into it. I think I know Italian enough for that, thanks to the songs I have learned.”
“Do you propose singing an aria to call a cab?” her husband asked. “And will you engage an apartment to the tune of ‘Hear me, Norma’?”
He smiled, and for a breath looked like his old self. But the next instant his face changed. The thought of his mother was enough to banish the smile for ever.
That thought had taken full possession of him, filling him with a terror, sorrow, and longing that burned in his heart like consuming fire. His flight had been made with no feeling but fear for himself; but with the first breath of the air of the city of saints, he inhaled a penitence which was without taint of weakness.
While his wife, then, arranged their affairs, and attended to the preparation of their little ménage, he took in hand the one work possible for him—the study of his own soul. This anguish for his mother, whom he loved deeply, much as he had wronged her, was like a sword that cleft the selfish crust of his nature. His whole life [pg 393] came up before him with merciless distinctness—all its ingratitude, its pettishness, its littleness, its sinful waste, its many downward steps leading to the final plunge to ruin. He saw, as if it were before him, his mother's loving, patient face; he heard, as if she were speaking at his side, her sad and tremulous voice; and more pathetic even than her sorrow were the brief moments of happiness he had given her, her smile of pride in him, her delight when he showed her some mark of affection, her eager anticipation of his wishes. As he went back over this past, the self-pity, the blindness, the false shame, were stripped away from him, and he saw himself as he was.
“Nothing but utter ruin could have brought me to my senses,” he said to his wife one day, when he had been sitting for a long while silent, gazing out at a little fountain that sprang into air in a vain effort to reach the laden orange-tree that overshadowed it.
She made no reply, and he needed none. She had let him go his own ways, keeping watch, but never interfering. She had nothing to do for him now but wait and see what sort of call he would make on her.
He wandered from church to church, and knelt at every shrine in the city of shrines. Wherever the signal lamp told that there some troubled soul had found help, he sent up his petition. He glanced with indifferent eyes past the rich marbles and gilding; but when a face looked from marble or canvas with an expression that touched his heart, there he made his appeal. The luxuries of life grew loathsome to him; fashion and gaiety were to him like a taunt of the evil one, who had used them as lures for his destruction. He hated the fineness of his own clothes, the daintiness of his food. None of the people he saw seemed to him enviable, save the poor monks in their coarse brown robes, with their bare feet thrust into rough sandals. In his own house he lived like an ascetic.
Now and then he would rouse himself from this stern and prolonged examen to think of his wife. She had claims on him which, perhaps, he was forgetting.