Aline laughed a joyous laugh which did Jimmie good to hear, and came behind his chair and put her arms about his neck, behaving foolishly as a young girl penetrated with the sense of the loved one's goodness is privileged to do. What she said is of infinitesimal importance, but it lifted care from Jimmie's heart and made him as happy as a child. Like two children, they discussed the project; and Aline fetching from the top shelf of the bookcase in Jimmie's bedroom a forlorn, dusty, yellow-paged Continental Bradshaw, twenty years old, they looked up phantom trains that had long ceased running, speculated on the merits of dead-and-gone hotels, and plunged into the fairyland of anachronistic information.
A few days were enough for Jimmie's simple arrangements; and then began the pilgrimage of these two, each bearing a burden, a heart-ache, a pain from which there was no escaping, but each bearing it with a certain splendour of courage that made life beautiful to the other. For the girl suffered keenly, as Jimmie knew. She had given a passionate heart for good and all to the handsome young fellow who had refused to bow the knee to the man whom he had every reason to consider a blackguard. They had come together, youth to youth, as naturally as two young birds in the first mating-season; but, fortunately or unfortunately for Aline, she was not a bird, but a human being of unalterable affections and indomitable character. She had the glorious faith, quia incredibile, in Jimmie, and rather than swerve aside from it she would have walked on knife edges all the rest of her days. So she scorned the pain, and scorned herself for feeling it when she saw the serenity with which he bore his cross. Dimly she felt that if the truth were known he would stand forth heroically, not infamously. She had revered him as a child does its father; but in that sweet and pure relationship of theirs, she had also watched him with the minute, jealous solicitude that a mother devotes to an only child who is incapable of looking after itself. Nothing in his character had escaped her. She knew both his strength and his enchanting weaknesses. To her trained eyes, he was all but transparent; and of late her quickened vision had read in letters of fire across his heart, “The desire of the moth for the star.”
So they travelled through the world, hand in hand, as it were, and drank together of its beauty. They were memorable journeyings. Sleeping-cars and palatial hotels and the luxuries of modern travel were not for them. Aline, who knew that Jimmie, as far as he himself was concerned, would have slept upon wood quite as cheerfully as upon feathers, but for her sake would have royally commanded down, held the purse-strings and dictated the expenditure. They had long, wonderful third-class journeys, stopping at every wayside station, at each having some picturesque change of company in the ever-crowded, evil-smelling, wooden-seated compartment. She laughed at Jimmie's fears as to her discomfort; protested with energetic sincerity that this was the only way in the world to travel with enjoyment. It was a never-failing interest to see Jimmie disarm the suspicion of peasants by his sympathetic knowledge of their interests, to listen to his arguments with the chance-met curé, perspiring and polite, or the mild young soldier in a brass helmet a size too big for him. In France she understood what they were saying, and maintained a proper protectorate over Jimmie by means of a rough and ready acquaintance with the vernacular. But in Italy she was dumb, could only regard Jimmie in open-mouthed astonishment and admiration. He spoke Italian. She had known him all her life and never suspected this accomplishment. It required some tact to keep him in his proper position as interpreter and restrain him from acting on his own initiative. In the towns they put up at little humble hostelries in by-streets and in country-places at rough inns, eating rude fare and drinking sour wine with great content. The more they economised the longer would the idyllic vagabondage last.
Through southern France and northern Italy they wandered without fixed plans, going from place to place as humour seized them, seeking the sunshine. At last it seemed to be their normal existence. London with its pain and its passion grew remote like the remembered anguish of a dream. Few communications reached them. The local newspaper gave them all the tidings they needed of the great world. It was a life free from vexation. The decaying splendour of the larger cities with their treasure-houses of painting and sculpture and their majestic palaces profoundly stirred the young girl's imagination and widened her conceptions and sympathies. But she loved best to arrive by a crazy, old-world diligence at some little townlet built on a sunny hillside, whose crumbling walls were the haunts of lizards and birds and strange wild-flowers; and having rested and eaten at the dark little albergo, smelling of wine and garlic and all Italian smells, to saunter out with Jimmie through the narrow, ill-paved, clattering streets alive with brown children and dark-eyed mothers, and men sitting on doorsteps violently gesticulating and screaming over the game of morra, and to explore the impossible place from end to end. A step or two when they desired it would bring them to the sudden peace of the mediaeval church, with its memories of Romanesque tradition and faint stirrings of Gothic curiously reflecting the faith of its builders; the rough, weather-beaten casket of one flawless gem of art, a Virgin smiling over the child on her lap at many generations of worshippers, superbly eternal and yet quaintly woman. And then they would pass out of the chilly streets and down the declivitous pathways below the town and sit together on the hillside, in a sun-baked spot sheltered from the wind. This Aline, vaguely conscious of the Infinite, called “hanging on the edge of Nowhere.”
One day, on such a hillside Jimmie had been painting three brown-faced children whom he had cajoled into posing for him, while Aline looked on dreamily. The urchins, dismissed with a few halfpennies, bowed polite thanks, the two boys taking off their caps with the air of ragged princes, and scampered away like rabbits out of sight.
“There!” cried Jimmie, throwing down his brush and holding out the little panel at arm's length. “I have never done anything so good in all my life! Have n't I got it? Is n't it better than ten cathedralfuls of sermons? Is n't it the quintessence of happiness, the perfect trust in the sweet earth to yield them its goodness? Could any one after seeing that dare say the world was only a dank and dismal prison where men do nothing but sit and hear each other groan? Look at it, Aline. What do you think of it?”
“It's just lovely, Jimmie,” said Aline.
“If I painted a pink hippopotamus standing on its head, you would say it was lovely. Why did n't you tell me that arm was out of drawing?”
He took up his brush and made the necessary correction. Aline laughed.
“Do you know one of the few things I can remember my father saying was about you?”