“Some day you will know, and then you will no longer be offended,” she said calmly, and took the sketch from his hand just as the sleeper stirred and began to awake. “And now, I beg you never to notice him again, or mention him to any one till I come to you for the picture.”
And so three years passed away, and there came an Easter morning such as Easters used to be in the days when the pope was King of Rome, and there was one city in the world where the business was religion.
Who can forget the scene, having once beheld it—the sky built up of sapphires, glitter on glitter of such blue as the queen of heaven might make her mantle of; the full, warm gold of the sunshine looking the sad ruins in the face till they smile, and revealing its hidden rainbows now and then, as the foamy columns of fountains sway in the light breeze, and catch it unawares; the birds, with long, pointed wings, that cut the air, and seem inebriated with the delight of flying. Then the crowd in the piazza of S. Peter's, the millennial mingling of rich and poor, royal and plebeian, making in all a scene to be witnessed nowhere else.
“How familiar, yet how new!” [pg 690] said a lady who stepped from her carriage at the barrier. “It is all I could wish! I am glad, Max, that we did not come sooner to Rome. I would rather my first sight of it should be a festal one.”
This lady was richly dressed, and the black lace of her large Spanish veil was drawn back from a face like a fresh lily.
She was instantly addressed as principessa by all the beggars about.
“I am sorry I cannot give you the title, Honora,” her husband said, and smilingly dropped a coin into each outstretched hand. “So nothing disappoints you? I thought it would be so. Now, we must not linger outside.”
“Let us go slowly up; and please do not speak to me,” Mrs. Schöninger said. “No, I do not want your arm now. I must enter S. Peter's the first time praying.”
They went slowly up the ascent, Honora with her hands clasped, and her eyes dilating as they entered the grand vestibule. Then Mr. Schöninger lifted the heavy curtain, and she crossed the threshold.
At that first step into S. Peter's a Catholic feels as though he had touched the beating heart of mother church.