Ending, she listened a moment, then stole across the room, and looked behind the screen. Lawrence was sleeping, with his head thrown back, his beautiful profile and moist, dark curls thrown out strongly by the garnet cushions and pillow.
She went to the window, and seated herself on a footstool near it, wrapping the long red curtains about her, and leaning against the wall. The sculptured marble of that stately salon was cold against her cheek; a flock of doves wheeling about over the garden caught some last rays of the sun on their wings, and threw them down over her, so that little white wings seemed to be fluttering all around the room; the casement slipped open, and the sound of tossing waters and twittering birds again became audible; but the watcher there took no note of these things. She was looking at the figure stretched on the sofa, and thinking that in all Rome there was no ruin so mournful and so terrible. He was like some fair column stricken from out a temple and cast aside into the dust; not touched by the hand of time, that, with its slow to-and-fro of days and nights, and seasons and years, lulls all the pain of decay to sleep, but broken and scathed, as if by lightning.
While she looked, he stirred, and opened his eyes; and the sympathetic pain with which she saw how he came back to a consciousness of his position almost drew an outcry from her. The first tranquil, half-wondering glance which saw, instead of the familiar surroundings of his childhood and youth, that immense room, with its profuse hangings and painted ceiling, and the long windows opening like doors; then the brief flash of startled questioning; lastly, the anguish of full recollection.
“O my God! my God!” he exclaimed, and hid his face in the cushions again.
She was at his side in a moment.
“Let us go out for a long drive, Lawrence,” she said. “There will be a bright moonlight to-night, and we can see so many places by it. Come! I will send for a carriage at once. There is nothing else for either of us to do.”
Nothing could have shown more clearly the change in Lawrence Gerald than his manner of receiving this proposal. Instead of expressing at once his aversion, and reproaching his wife that she could believe it possible for him to go sight-seeing at such a time, he stopped to consider if what she thought best might not be best, however it should seem to him.
“You must think for me now, Annette,” he said with a sort of despair. “You know I do not wish to seek pleasure nor distraction; but I suppose I must live.”
She sent for a carriage at once, and they went out under the full moon that was beginning to replace, with its pearly southern lights and northern shadows, the fading cross-lights of the sun. They drove to the Colosseum, not yet despoiled of its sacred emblems, and, kneeling there in the dust, made the stations in their own way. Annette named each one as they reached it, then left her husband to make his meditation, or to utter the ejaculation that started up from his tormented heart, as sharp as a blade from its sheath.
At last they stood together by the crucifix, with the moonlight falling on them and through the great arches in a silvery rain.