Part 10

And the daughter came, her light-brown hair falling carelessly over her shoulders, her rich, hazel eye twinkling and full of life, the color coming and going upon her transparent cheek, and her bosom heaving with her quick step. With one hand she put back the scattered locks that had fallen over her forehead, while she laid the other gently upon the arm of her mother, and asked in that sweet music of the south—“_cosa volete, mamma?_”

It was the prettiest picture I had seen in many a day; and this, notwithstanding I was in Rome, and had come that very morning from the Palace of Borghese.

The stout lady was my hostess, and Enrica—so fair, so young, so unlike in her beauty, to other Italian beauties, was my landlady’s daughter. The house was one of those tall houses—very, very old which stand along the eastern side of the Corso, looking out upon the Piazzo di Colonna. The staircases were very tall and dirty, and they were narrow and dark. Four flights of stone steps led up to the corridor where they lived. A little trap was in the door; and there was a bell-rope, at the least touch of which, I was almost sure to hear tripping feet run along the stone floor within, and then to see the trap thrown slyly back, and those deep hazel eyes looking out upon me; and then the door would open, and along the corridor, under the daughter’s guidance (until I had learned the way), I passed to my Roman home. I was a long time learning the way.

My chamber looked out upon the Corso, and I could catch from it a glimpse of the top of the tall column of Antoninus, and of a fragment of the palace of the governor. My parlor, which was separated from the apartments of the family by a narrow corridor, looked upon a small court, hung around with balconies. From the upper one a couple of black-eyed girls are occasionally looking out, and they can almost read the title of my book, when I sit by the window. Below are three or four blooming _ragazze_, who are dark-eyed, and have Roman luxuriance of hair. The youngest is a friend of our Enrica, and is of course frequently looking up with all the innocence in the world, to see if Enrica may be looking out.

Night after night a bright blaze glows upon my hearth, of the alder faggots which they bring from the Albanian hills. Night after night, too, the family come in to aid my blundering speech and to enjoy the rich sparkling of my faggot fire. Little Cesare, a dark-faced Italian boy, takes up his position with pencil and slate, and draws by the light of the blaze genii and castles. The old one-eyed teacher of Enrica lays his snuff box upon the table, and his handkerchief across his lap, and with his spectacles upon his nose, and his big fingers on the lesson, runs through the French tenses of the verb _amare_. The father, a sallow-faced, keen-eyed man, with true Italian visage, sits with his arms upon the elbows of his chair, and talks of the pope, or of the weather. A spruce count from the Marches of Ancona, wears a heavy watch seal, and reads Dante with _furore_. The mother, with arms akimbo, looks proudly upon her daughter, and counts her, as well she may, a gem among the Roman beauties.

The table was round, with the fire blazing on one side; there was scarce room for but three upon the other. Signor _il maestro_ was one—then Enrica, and next—how well I remember it—came myself. For I could sometimes help Enrica to a word of French; and far oftener she could help me to a word of Italian. Her face was rich, and full of feeling; I used greatly to love to watch the puzzled expressions that passed over her forehead, as the sense of some hard phrase escaped her; and better still, to see the happy smile, as she caught at a glance, the thought of some old scholastic Frenchman, and transferred it into the liquid melody of her speech.

She had seen just sixteen summers, and only that very autumn was escaped from the thraldom of a convent, upon the skirts of Rome. She knew nothing of life, but the life of feeling; and all thoughts of happiness lay as yet in her childish hopes. It was pleasant to look upon her face; and it was still more pleasant to listen to that sweet Roman voice. What a rich flow of superlatives, and endearing diminutives, from those vermilion lips! Who would not have loved the study, and who would not have loved—without meaning it—the teacher?

In those days I did not linger long at the tables of lame Pietro in the Via Condotti: but would hurry back to my little Roman parlor—the fire was so pleasant! And it was so pleasant to greet Enrica with her mother, even before the one-eyed _maestro_ had come in; and it was pleasant to unfold the book between us, and to lay my hand upon the page—a small page—where hers lay already. And when she pointed wrong, it was pleasant to correct her—over and over; insisting that her hand should be here, and not there, and lifting those little fingers from one page, and putting them down upon the other. And sometimes, half provoked with my fault-finding she would pat my hand smartly with hers; but when I looked in her face to know what _that_ could mean, she would meet my eye with such a kind submission, and half earnest regret, as made me not only pardon the offense—but tempt me to provoke it again.

Through all the days of Carnival, when I rode pelted with _confetti_, and pelting back, my eyes used to wander up, from a long way off, to that tall house upon the Corso, where I was sure to meet, again and again, those forgiving eyes and that soft brown hair, all gathered under the little brown sombrero, set off with one pure white plume. And her hand full of bon-bons, she would shake at me threateningly; and laugh—a musical laugh—as I bowed my head to the assault, and recovering from the shower of missiles, would turn to throw my stoutest bouquet at her balcony. At night I would bear home to the Roman parlor my best trophy of the day, as a guerdon for Enrica; and Enrica would be sure to render in acknowledgment, some carefully hidden flowers, the prettiest that her beauty had won.

Sometimes upon those Carnival nights, she arrays herself in the costume of the Albanian water-carriers; and nothing, one would think, could be prettier than the laced crimson jacket, and the strange headgear with its trinkets, and the short skirts leaving to view as delicate an ankle as could be found in Rome. Upon another night, she glides into my little parlor, as we sit by the blaze, in a close velvet bodice, and with a Swiss hat caught up by a looplet of silver, and adorned with a full-blown rose—nothing you think could be prettier than this. Again, in one of her girlish freaks, she robes herself like a nun; and with the heavy black serge, for dress, and the funereal veil—relieved only by the plain white ruffle of her cap—you wish she were always a nun. But the wish vanishes, when you see her in a pure white muslin, with a wreath of orange blossoms about her forehead, and a single white rose-bud in her bosom.

Upon the little balcony Enrica keeps a pot or two of flowers, which bloom all winter long; and each morning I find upon my table a fresh rosebud; each night, I bear back for thank-offering the prettiest bouquet that can be found in the Via Conditti. The quiet fireside evenings come back; in which my hand seeks its wonted place upon her book; and my other _will_ creep around upon the back of Enrica’s chair, and Enrica _will_ look indignant—and then all forgiveness.

One day I received a large packet of letters—ah, what luxury to lie back in my big armchair, there before the crackling faggots, with the pleasant rustle of that silken dress beside me, and run over a second, and a third time, those mute paper missives, which bore to me over so many miles of water, the words of greeting, and of love. It would be worth traveling to the shores of the Ægean, to find one’s heart quickened into such life as the ocean letters will make. Enrica threw down her book, and wondered what could be in them—and snatched one from my hand, and looked with sad, but vain intensity over that strange scrawl. What can it be? said she; and she laid her finger upon the little half line—“Dear Paul.”

I told her it was—“_Caro mio_.”

Enrica laid it upon her lap and looked in my face; “It is from your mother?” said she.

“No,” said I.

“From your sister?” said she.

“Alas, no!”

“_Il vostro fratello, dunque?_”

“_Nemmeno_”—said I, “not from a brother either.”

She handed me the letter, and took up her book; and presently she laid the book down again; and looked at the letter, and then at me—and went out.

She did not come in again that evening; in the morning, there was no rose-bud on my table. And when I came at night, with a bouquet from Pietro’s at the corner, she asked me—“who had written my letter?”

“A very dear friend,” said I.

“A lady?” continued she.

“A lady,” said I.

“Keep this bouquet for her,” said she, and put it in my hands.

“But, Enrica, she has plenty of flowers; she lives among them, and each morning her children gather them by scores to make garlands of.”

Enrica put her fingers within my hand to take again the bouquet; and for a moment I held both fingers and flowers.

The flowers slipped out first.

I had a friend at Rome in that time, who afterward died between Ancona and Corinth; we were sitting one day upon a block of tufa in the middle of the Coliseum, looking up at the shadows which the waving shrubs upon the southern wall cast upon the ruined arcades within, and listening to the chirping sparrows that lived upon the wreck—when he said to me suddenly—“Paul, you love the Italian girl.”

“She is very beautiful,” said I.

“I think she is beginning to love you,” said he soberly.

“She has a very warm heart, I believe,” said I.

“Ay,” said he.

“But her feelings are those of a girl,” continued I.

“They are not,” said my friend; and he laid his hand upon my knee, and left off drawing diagrams with his cane; “I have seen, Paul, more than you of this southern nature. The Italian girl of fifteen is a woman; an impassioned, sensitive, tender creature—yet still a woman; you are loving—if you love—a full-grown heart; she is loving—if she loves—as a ripe heart should.”

“But I do not think that either is wholly true,” said I.

“Try it,” said he, setting his cane down firmly, and looking in my face.

“How?” returned I.

“I have three weeks upon my hands,” continued he. “Go with me into the Appenines; leave your home in the Corso, and see if you can forget in the air of the mountains, your bright-eyed Roman girl.”

I was pondering for an answer, when he went on: “It is better so; love as you might, that southern nature with all its passion, is not the material to build domestic happiness upon; nor is your northern habit—whatever you may think at your time of life, the one to cherish always those passionate sympathies which are bred by this atmosphere, and their scenes.”

One moment my thought ran to my little parlor, and to that fairy figure, and to that sweet angel face; and then, like lightning it traversed oceans, and fed upon the old ideal of home, and brought images to my eye of lost—dead ones, who seemed to be stirring on heavenly wings, in that soft Roman atmosphere, with greeting, and with beckoning.

—“I will go with you,” said I.

The father shrugged his shoulders, when I told him I was going to the mountains, and wanted a guide. His wife said it would be cold upon the hills, for the winter was not ended. Enrica said it would be warm in the valleys, for the spring was coming. The old man drummed with his fingers on the table, and shrugged his shoulders again, but said nothing.

My landlady said I could not ride. Cesare said it would be hard walking. Enrica asked papa, if there would be any danger. And again the old man shrugged his shoulders. Again I asked him, if he knew a man who would serve us as a guide among the Appenines; and finding me determined, he shrugged his shoulders, and said he would find one the next day.

As I passed out at evening, on my way to the Piazzo near the Monte Citorio, where stand the carriages that go out to Tivoli, Enrica glided up to me, and whispered—“_Ah, mi dispiace tanto—tanto, Signor!_”

THE APPENINES

I SHOOK her hand, and in an hour afterward was passing, with my friend, by the Trajan forum, toward the deep shadow of San Maggiore, which lay in our way to the mountains. At sunset we were wandering over the ruin of Adrian’s villa, which lies upon the first step of the Appenines. Behind us, the vesper bells of Tivoli were sounding, and their echoes floating sweetly under the broken arches; before us, stretching all the way to the horizon, lay the broad Campagna; while in the middle of its great waves, turned violet-colored by the hues of twilight, rose the grouped towers of the Eternal City; and lording it among them all, like a giant, stood the black dome of St. Peter’s.

Day after day we stretched on over the mountains, leaving the Campagna far behind us. Rocks and stones, huge and ragged, lie strewn over the surface right and left; deep yawning valleys lie in the shadows of mountains, that loom up thousands of feet, bearing, perhaps, upon their tops old castellated towns, perched like birds’ nests. But mountain and valley are blasted and scarred; the forests even are not continuous, but struggle for a livelihood; as if the brimstone fire that consumed Nineveh, had withered their energies. Sometimes our eyes rest on a great white scar of the broken calcareous rock, on which the moss cannot grow, and the lizards dare not creep. Then we see a cliff beetling far aloft, with the shining walls of some monastery of holy men glistening at its base. The wayside brooks do not seem to be the gentle offspring of bountiful hills, but the remnants of something greater, whose greatness has expired—they are turbid rills, rolling in the bottom of yawning chasms. Even the shrubs have a look, as if the Volscian war-horse had trampled them down to death; and the primroses and the violets by the mountain path alone look modestly beautiful amid the ruin.

Sometimes we loiter in a valley, above which the goats are browsing on the cliffs, and listen to the sweet pastoral pipes of the Appenines. We see the shepherds in their rough skin coats, high over our heads. Their herds are feeding, as it seems, on ledges of a hand’s breadth. The sweet sound floats and lingers in the soft atmosphere, without a breath of wind to bear it away, or a noise to disturb its melody. The shadows slant more and more as we linger; and the kids begin to group together. And as we wander on, through the stunted vineyard in the bottom of the valley, the sweet sound flows after us, like a river of song—nor leaves us, till the kids have vanished in the distance, and the cliffs themselves, become one dark wall of shadow.

At night, in some little meager mountain town, we stroll about in the narrow passways, or wander under the heavy arches of the mountain churches. Shuffling old women grope in and out; dim lamps glimmer faintly at the side altars, shedding horrid light upon painted images of the dying Christ. Or, perhaps, to make the old pile more solemn, there stands some bier in the middle, with a figure or two kneeling at the foot, and ragged boys move stealthily under the shadows of the columns. Presently comes a young priest, in black robes, and lights a taper at the foot, and another at the head—for there is a dead man on the bier; and the parched, thin features look awfully under the yellow light of the tapers, in the gloom of the great building. It is very, very damp in the church, and the body of the dead man seems to make the air heavy, so we go out into the starlight again.

In the morning, the western slopes wear broad shadows, and the frosts crumple, on the herbage, to our tread: across the valley, it is like summer; and the birds—for there are songsters in the Appenines—make summer music. Their notes blend softly with the faint sounds of some far-off convent bell, tolling for morning mass, and strike the frosted and shaded mountain side, with a sweet echo. As we toil on, and the shaded hills begin to glow in the sunshine, we pass a train of mules, loaded with wine. We have seen them an hour before—little black dots twining along the white streak of footway upon the mountain above us. We lost them as we began to ascend, until a wild snatch of an Appenine song turned our eyes up, and there, straggling through the brush, they appeared again; a foot slip would have brought the mules and wine casks rolling upon us. We keep still, holding by the brushwood, to let them pass. An hour more, and we see them toiling slowly—mule and muleteer—big dots and little dots—far down where we have been before. The sun is hot and smoking on them in the bare valleys; the sun is hot and smoking on the hill side, where we are toiling over the broken stones. I thought of little Enrica, when she said: “the spring was coming!”

Time and again we sit down together—my friend and I—upon some fragment of rock, under the broad-armed chestnuts, that fringe the lower skirts of the mountains, and talk through the hottest of the noon, of the warriors of Sylla, and of the Sabine woman—but oftener—of the pretty peasantry, and of the sweet-faced Roman girl. He, too, tells me of his life and loves, and of the hopes that lie misty and grand before him: little did we think that in so few years, his hopes would be gone, and his body lying low in the Adriatic, or tossed with the drift upon the Dalmatian shores! Little did I think that here under the ancestral wood—still a wishful and blundering mortal, I should be gathering up the shreds that memory can catch of our Appenine wandering, and be weaving them into my bachelor dreams.

Away again upon the quick wing of thought, I follow our steps, as after weeks of wandering, we gained once more a height that overlooked the Campagna—and saw the sun setting on its edge, throwing into relief the dome of St. Peter’s, and blazing in a red stripe upon the waters of the Tiber.

Below us was Palestrina—the Præneste of the poets and philosophers; the dwelling place of—I know not how many—emperors. We went straggling through the dirty streets, searching for some tidy-looking osteria. At length we found an old lady who could give us a bed, but no dinner. My friend dropped in a chair disheartened. A snub-looking priest came out to condole with us.

And could Palestrina—the _frigidum Præneste_ of Horace, which had entertained over and over, the noblest of the Colonna, and the most noble Adrian—could Palestrina not furnish a dinner to a tired traveler?

“_Si, Signore_,” said the snub-looking priest.

“_Si, Signorino_,” said the neat old lady; and away we went upon a new search. And we found bright and happy faces; especially the little girl of twelve years, who came close by me as I ate, and afterward strung a garland of marigolds, and put it on my head. Then there was a bright-eyed boy of fourteen, who wrote his name, and those of the whole family, upon a fly-leaf of my book; and a pretty, saucy-looking girl of sixteen, who peeped a long time from behind the kitchen door, but before the evening was gone, she was in the chair beside me, and had written her name—Carlotta—upon the first leaf of my journal.

When I woke, the sun was up. From my bed I could see over the town, the thin, lazy mists lying on the old camp-ground of Pyrrhus; beyond it were the mountains, which hide Frascati, and Monte-Cavi. There was old Colonna, too, that—

Like an eagle’s nest, hangs on the crest Of purple Appenine.

As the mist lifted, and the sun brightened the plain, I could see the road, along which Sylla came fuming and maddened after the Mithridaten war. I could see, as I half dreamed and half slept, the frightened peasantry whooping to their long-horned cattle, as they drove them on tumultuously up through the gateways of the town; and women with babies in their arms, and children scowling with fear and hate—all trooping fast and madly, to escape the hand of the Avenger; alas! ineffectually, for Sylla murdered them, and pulled down the walls of their town—the proud Palestrina.

I had a queer fancy of seeing the nobles of Rome, led on by Stefano Colonna, grouping along the plain, their corslets flashing out of the mists—their pennants dashing above it—coming up fast, and still as the wind, to make the Mural Præneste, their stronghold against the Last of the Tribunes. And strangely mingling fiction with fact, I saw the brother of Walter de Montreal, with his noisy and bristling army, crowd over the Campagna, and put up his white tents, and hang out his showy banners, on the grassy knolls that lay nearest my eye.

—But the knolls were all quiet; there was not so much as a strolling _contadino_ on them, to whistle a mimic fife-note. A little boy from the inn went with me upon the hill, to look out upon the town and the wide sea of land below; and whether it was the soft, warm April sun, or the gray ruins below me, or whether the wonderful silence of the scene, or some wild gush of memory, I do not know, but something made me sad.

“_Perché cosi penseroso!_—why so sad” said the quick-eyed boy. “The air is beautiful, the scene is beautiful; Signore is young, why is he sad?”

“And is Giovanni never sad?” said I.

“_Quasi mai_,” said the boy, “and if I could travel as Signore, and see other countries, I would be always gay.”

“May you be always that!” said I.

The good wish touched him; he took me by the arms, and said—“Go home with me, Signore; you were happy at the inn last night; go back, and we will make you gay again!”

—If we could be always boys!

I thanked him in a way that saddened him. We passed out shortly after from the city gates, and strode on over the rolling plain. Once or twice we turned back to look at the rocky heights beneath which lay the ruined town of Palestrina—a city that defied Rome—that had a king before a plowshare had touched the Capitoline, or the Janiculan hill! The ivy was covering up richly the Etruscan foundations, and there was a quiet over the whole place. The smoke was rising straight into the sky from the chimney tops; a peasant or two were going along the road with donkeys; beside this, the city was, to all appearance, a dead city. And it seemed to me that an old monk, whom I could see with my glass, near the little chapel above the town, might be going to say mass for the soul of the dead city.

And afterward, when we came near to Rome, and passed under the temple tomb of Metella—my friend said—“And will you go back now to your home? or will you set off with me to-morrow for Ancona?”

“At least, I must say adieu,” returned I.

“God speed you!” said he, and we parted upon the Piazza di Venezia—he for his last mass at St. Peter’s, and I for the tall house upon the Corso.

ENRICA

I HEAR her glancing feet the moment I have tinkled the bell; and there she is, with her brown hair gathered into braids, and her eyes full of joy and greeting. And as I walk with the mother to the window to look at some pageant that is passing, she steals up behind and passes her arm around me, with a quick electric motion and a gentle pressure of welcome that tells more than a thousand words.

It is a pageant of death that is passing below. Far down the street we see heads thrust out of the windows and standing in bold relief against the red torchlight of the moving train. Below dim figures are gathering on the narrow side ways to look at the solemn spectacle. A hoarse chant rises louder and louder, and half dies in the night air, and breaks out again with new and deep bitterness.