CHAPTER XII.

It was Fulvia’s wedding-day. Some days before Minna had had most of her belongings removed to a couple of rooms which she had taken. She felt it utterly impossible to remain in the house after the event should have taken place, and would gladly have left, but, on saying something of the kind to Fulvia herself, she had noticed a look of alarm and disappointment pass over her face and dilate her eyes. That was enough for Minna; but as well as that she had the half-superstitious feeling that even at the very last second something might happen to avert the catastrophe.

Nothing had happened; nothing was going to happen. Minna, on this unhappy day, left the house early, not intending to return to it. She had said good-bye to Fulvia the night before. As for Signor Giuseppe, she had scarcely caught so much as a glimpse of him for many days. The man contrived to hide and efface himself, as it were. Sometimes Minna was aware of a kind of slender dark shadow slipping away in the background, silent, rapid, noiseless. Once or twice she had tried to lay hold of the shadow, to say a few words to it, to force it to speak to her, but she had not been successful. She had a painful, deep conviction that Signor Giuseppe was suffering horribly; that he had probably used every persuasion, every argument that he could think of, to persuade Signora Dietrich to abandon her purpose, and that his utter failure to move or turn her aside had literally crushed him. The thought of this helpless misery made Minna suffer too. In the night, sometimes, if she awoke and began to reflect upon all that was going on, she found it was usually to him that her thoughts turned with the greatest pity and compunction.

The ‘threadbare old scarecrow of a former lover of Signora Dietrich,’ Mrs. Charrington had called him; and it was a grandly contemptuous way of dismissing the whole subject. But Minna could not dismiss it. A threadbare old scarecrow (human) may suffer, and is not so well able to fight his sufferings or the cause of them as a younger and stronger man might be. She had this conviction very strongly, and would gladly have afforded consolation had it been in her power to do so, but she found no opportunity for it. He avoided her in the house, never came near the studio, and someone said that Signor Oriole was very much engaged at his office. Minna did not believe it.

It was a wonderful morning, late in April--that wedding-day. As Minna made her way from Casa Dietrich to her studio, a delicious air blew upon her face. The sky was flecked with white clouds. Rain had fallen in the night, and the streets of Rome were glistening with the damp. Now it was dark, now light, under the changing sky. The endless din of the great city resounded on every side, as she walked with a heavy heart through it all. She hoped in a few hours to be many miles away from the city. She took a book and sat in the window waiting till the carriage should come for her which she had ordered on her way hither.

Before the said carriage arrived, she heard a step in the corridor, a subdued knock, and then the door was opened, and Signor Giuseppe presented himself before her. A great weight fell from Minna’s heart. She had foreboded she knew not what from his silence and avoidance of her.

‘You have come,’ she exclaimed with animation, rising and going a little towards him. Then she stopped, silent, not knowing what more to say, he looked so woebegone, so utterly broken, and without heart or courage--so unlike himself.

‘I thought you would be at the office,’ said Minna gently at last, going up to him and taking his hand.

‘So did I,’ he replied drearily. ‘And to-day, of all days in the year, the poor distraction of my daily drudgery has been taken away from me. Imagine, signora. When I arrived at the office this morning, the porter met me with the announcement that we, the clerks, all had a holiday without any abatement of our week’s salary.’ He laughed. ‘And for what reason, do you suppose? Because the eldest son of the head of the firm is to be married this morning, and is so elated at his good fortune that he last night got his father to consent to this arrangement, and each of us, as we arrived, received the news. Another wedding,’ pursued Signor Giuseppe with melancholy bitterness. ‘I suppose the porter thought me mad, for, instead of smiling and expressing my delight at the event, I begged to be allowed to go in and proceed with my work. “God forbid!” cried the fellow. “Do you suppose I am going to waste my precious hours of freedom because you are fool enough to wish to work when there is no need of it?” He flourished his keys, and I came to my senses enough to assure him that it had only been a joke on my part. I turned away, and after wandering about for half an hour, I could bear it no longer, but came here. I knew you would not refuse me a corner till the day is over, even----’

‘Surely,’ said she, ever more and more gently. ‘I am thankful you had confidence enough in me to come here. In a few minutes the carriage will come which will take me out of Rome for the day. You will come with me. We will both escape.’

‘Go away,’ he said unwillingly. ‘I had not thought of that.’

‘But I think of it. It will be much the best for us both. I am going to Villa Adriana, outside Tivoli. You are just the companion I should wish at that place; so it is agreed.’

‘To Villa Adriana,’ he responded, with something like a smile. ‘Ah, what a happy afternoon I once spent there with the child and one of her young companions! That is years ago. I will go with you, signora.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Minna, speaking much more cheerfully than she felt. She was glad to have gained her end, and had a hope that when they had once set off, and he was within sight of the endless remnants of the former glory of his beloved city, he might cast off some of his present wretchedness, and begin to be interested in the things he had studied so deeply.

It was as she had expected. At first, and for some little time after they had set off, he continued to be sad and silent. Minna could have been the same, but she made an effort, put it aside, and when they at last got into the open country, and into one of the campagna roads, she roused her companion, by asking him what was this or that object which they were passing or approaching. Gradually he also roused, his enthusiasm kindled; he began to relate the history of first one thing and then another. Then by-and-by, when they had left behind them every trace of the city, and were out on the open campagna, they began to feel its influence--its melancholy grandeur, its solitude, its majesty. Their driver, who knew his way well, took them, at Minna’s desire, as much out of the beaten track as possible; and before they arrived at the villa they had traversed roads on which she had never been before. They were all known, however, to her companion, who explained them to her, with their bearing and connection with other roads, all with the most minute and perfect exactness.

The clouds gradually grew more white and less black; then by degrees unfolded, spread away and rolled aside, leaving great expanses of the blue peculiar to those skies and to no others. The exulting song of larks was everywhere. Dainty small flowers of every shape and every hue, veritable lilies of the field, carpeted the grass at either side of the road. Brilliant little green lizards sunned themselves on large gray stones and fragments of walls and tombs, whose mystery no man should ever unravel. Now and then a flock of sheep in charge of some dark-faced herdsman with a gleaming smile looked up in mild but not alarmed astonishment as they drove by. Turning her head, and looking behind her, Minna saw where the great city lay in the distance, gray or purple or blue, as the clouds shifted and the light flashed or faded; dim but mighty, with misty-looking domes and cupolas confusedly raising themselves from the general mass, and seeming to beckon back into their charmed circle those who ventured to break forth from it. She had fled from it all this morning, feeling as if one only of the many wickednesses which it sheltered, which were perpetrated within its walls--the one blot upon its splendour which happened to have come under her own eyes had darkened it for ever to her; but now, despite this feeling which was still there, she felt her heart-strings drawn, as they ever were, by a longing which amounted to pain, as she saw that vague outline in the distance, of the great empress-queen of all cities, past, present, and to come, shrunken from her former dimensions, stripped of her former splendour, modernized, vulgarized, patronized (as her companion had once so bitterly complained) by hordes of the curious and pleasure-seeking leisured classes of the world, but matchless still, supreme and imperial still.

She did not speak her thought to Signor Giuseppe. In the present circumstances she was almost ashamed of having such a thought.

They had now left the wilder campagna, and were within a mile of the villa gates. They had got into the region of cultivated fields and trees--into the home of the almond and olive. The former grew in orchards showing every shade of blossom, from a shell-tinted white to the deepest, richest rose-pink.

The exquisite bloom hung like clouds over the fields. In the hedges were masses of blackthorn, like fairy lace flung over the boughs. Now and then a whiff of perfume betrayed the near presence of hidden violets--it was all nearly over, at the last stage of its loveliness. In another week it would be too late to see all this magic of spring. Blossoms would be shed; the fairy colours would have given place to ordinary green leaves. The early flowers would be over. One might mourn them, but who could forget that the compensation would be--roses?

The carriage stopped at the gaudy modern gate which is the entrance to the solemnly beautiful cypress avenue, the beginning of the great expanse of ruined grandeur and desolate beauty which were once Hadrian’s summer palace.

They got out, and arranged with the driver to meet them at the gates many hours later. Minna rejoiced his heart by a noble _buona mano_ for himself and his horses, bidding him refresh himself and them as he listed. Then they entered the avenue, and in ten minutes were wandering, untroubled by guides or _custodi_, through those gardens and passages, past those almost obliterated ruins and buildings which yet in their decay and wreck call aloud to attest the wonder and splendour, beyond words to describe, of which they once had formed a part.

The hours flew by while they walked or sat and ate their lunch, and speculated and wondered as to the meaning of this, that, and the other, and Signor Giuseppe was beguiled into a long, learned, ingenious dissertation on the character of Hadrian, which, it will readily be understood, he had studied with both ardour and acumen; and Minna, seated in the deserted nymphæum, with its falling water, and melancholy statues, and waving trees, with a golden sky above, a wilderness of purple violets below, murmured to herself, ‘Animula, vagula, blandula,’ and the rest of it, and had almost forgotten her own heartache in pondering on the past, when suddenly her companion, snatching his watch from its place, looked at it, and said, in an indescribable voice:

‘Past five. It must be all over and done with now.’

Minna’s heart sank like lead. She felt a criminal for being here, for having for one moment felt something that might be called enjoyment.

‘Let us go,’ she said abruptly, starting from her place.

* * * * *

They were well on the homeward way to Rome, and had been almost silent the whole time. Then Minna said casually:

‘I will put you down at the door of Casa Dietrich, Signor Oriole. You know that I do not return there.’

‘Nor I,’ was the curt response. ‘You can spare yourself the trouble. I will get out where our ways part.’

‘You do not return?’ she cried, astonished.

‘I? Never; if it is intolerable for you, what do you suppose it must be for me? I told Signora Dietrich some weeks ago, “The day you marry the child to the Australian, I shake the dust of your house from my feet.” She laughed at me, and said, “Bene!” Not long before, when I thought, for other reasons, of going away, she almost went on her knees to me to beg me to remain.’

It was the only allusion he had ever made to any words that might have passed between him and Signora Dietrich. Minna knew instinctively that only strong excitement had called it forth.

‘But--but----’ she stammered, for there came with vivid clearness to her mind the fact that he was exceedingly poor; had a salary of some seventy or eighty pounds a year, all told, and that but for the home at Casa Dietrich, which, it is true, he paid for with his heart’s blood, he must have been reduced to absolute indigence. She felt a chill at her very heart. ‘Where do you go, if I may venture to ask?’ she inquired.

‘To a little lodging which I have taken. It does not matter where it is,’ said he calmly, but with a certain pride at the same time. ‘It is no place where I could ask any of my friends to come and see me. Do not think I am complaining,’ he went on with perfect self-possession; ‘it is just. I have merited it. My own weakness, my own selfishness and folly, taking a shape of which I will not speak to you, have placed me in the pitiable, the contemptible position in which you see me to-day. It is true, I have been punished already many years for my sin. It is equally true that no number of years of expiation could sufficiently atone for it. I stayed, like you, signora, to the last moment, in the futile hope that something might happen--to be near her till the end. Nay, more,’ he added, sinking his voice, ‘I called her to me one day not long ago, and I told her that, if she chose to confront the risk and the misery of it, I would go away with her--fly, in fact, from that house and from her fate, and would work for her as for my daughter, would never desert her till life deserted me. But she would not. She said she thanked me for what I offered, and trusted me, but that it would not make things much better; it would not give her her mother again. I knew then that this thing would happen. Of course such things do happen, and worse, if there can be any worse. Nothing is too ghastly to be true. Now I have lost her--it is merely continuing my life alone.’

‘I understand that. But you must not cut yourself off from everyone and everything,’ she said in distress. ‘If you will not tell me where you are going--but, yes, you will tell me where you are going. I will never intrude upon you, never interfere with you, but I must know where you are. Give me your address. I’ll promise not even to look at it unless there is some urgent reason for my doing so.’

‘I cannot understand why you should hold so much to it,’ he remarked; ‘but if it is so you shall have it--I will send it to you. And sometimes, if you will let me, I will come and see you.’

‘Indeed you will, or I shall be very unhappy,’ she said, almost choked with tears. ‘I do not like this. I do not approve of it. I don’t know what to do. You have taken me utterly by surprise.’

‘Ma che!’ he exclaimed, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Never mind me. Here I will get out,’ he added, stopping the coachman at the entrance to a narrow street in the purlieus of Trajan’s Forum. ‘I will send you the address,’ he went on, ‘and do not be disturbed if it should be some little time before you see me again. I have need of solitude, to get accustomed to the new order of things.’

He stood beside the carriage, shutting the door, clasped her hand for a moment, baring his head, and bowing over it with an old-fashioned courtliness which all his troubles had not untaught him.

‘Grazie infinite,’ he said, resolutely smiling at her and signing to the driver to go on.

Minna had a final glimpse of him standing with his hat in his hand under a street-lamp--for it was now quite dark--and looking after her.

‘It is all wrong,’ she said to herself--‘wrong from beginning to end. What will be the end of it all?’