A Voyage of Consolation Part 14

The Senator, momma, and Mrs. Portheris stood in the cathedral door.

Isabel and Mr. Mafferton occupied the middle distance. Mr. Mafferton stooped to add a poppy to a slender handful of wild flowers he held out to her. Isabel was looking back.

"It will be pleasant inside the Duomo," I said. "Let us go on. I feel warm. I agree with you that the situation is serious, d.i.c.ky. Look at those poppies! When an Englishman does that you may make up your mind to the worst. But I don't think anybody need have the slightest respect for the affections of Mr. Mafferton."

Inside the Duomo it was pleasant, and cool, and there was a dim religious light that gave one an opportunity for reflection. I was so much engaged in reflection that I failed to notice the shape of the Duomo, but I have since learned that it was a basilica, in the form of a Latin cross, and was simply full of things which should have claimed my attention. Momma took copious notes from which I see that the Madonna and Child holy water basin was perfectly sweet, and the episcopal throne by Uervellesi in 1536 was the finest piece of tarsia work in the world, and the large bronze hanging lamp by Vincenzo Possento was the object which a.s.sisted Galileo to invent the oscillations of the pendulum. The Senator was much taken with the inlaid wooden stalls in the choir, the subjects were so lively. He and his Aunt Caroline nearly came to words over a monkey regarding its reflection in a looking gla.s.s, done with a realism which Mrs. Portheris considered little short of profane, but which poppa found quite an excusable filip to devotions which must have been such an all day business in the sixteenth century. Outside, however, poppa found it difficult to approve the facade. To throw four galleries over the street door, he said, with no visible means of getting into them or possible object for sitting there, was about the most ridiculous waste of building s.p.a.ce he had yet observed.

"But then," said d.i.c.ky Dod, who kept his disconsolate place by my side, "they didn't seem to know how to waste enough in those pre-elevator days. Look at the pictures and the bronzes and the marble columns inside there--ten times as much as they had any use for. They just heaped it up."

"That's so, d.i.c.ky, my boy," replied poppa; "we could cover more ground with the money in our century. But you've got to remember that they hadn't any other way worth mentioning of spending the taxes. Religion, so to speak, was the boss contractor's only line."

d.i.c.ky remarked that it had to be admitted he worked it on the square, and momma said that no doubt people built as well as they knew how at that time, but nothing should induce her to add her weight to the top of the Leaning Tower.

"It is very remarkable and impressive," said momma, "the idea of its hanging over that way all these centuries, just on the drop and never dropping, but who knows that it may not come down this very day!"

"My dear niece, if I may call you so," remarked Mrs. Portheris urbanely, "it was thus that the builders designed this great monument to stand; in its inclination lies the triumph of their art."

"I can't say I agree with you there, Aunt Caroline," said poppa; "that tower was never meant to stand crooked. It's a very serious defect, and if it happened nowadays, it would justify any Munic.i.p.al Board in repudiating the contract. Even those fellows, you see, were too sick to go on with it, in every case. Begun by Bona.n.u.s 1174. Bona.n.u.s saw what was going to happen and gave it up at the third storey. Then Benenato had _his_ show, got it up to four, and quit, 1203. The next architect was--let me see--William of Innsbruck. He put on a couple more, and by that time it began to look dangerous. But nothing happened from 1260 to 1350, and it struck Tomaso Pisano that nothing would happen. He risked it anyhow, ran up another storey, put the roof on, and came in for the credit of the whole miracle. I expect Tomaso is at the bottom of that idea of yours, Aunt Caroline. He would naturally give the reporters that view."

Mrs. Portheris listened with a tolerance as badly put on as any garment she was wearing. "I do not usually make a.s.sertions," she said when poppa had finished, "without being convinced of the facts," and I became aware for the first time that her upper lip wore a slight moustache.

"Well, you'll excuse me, Aunt Caroline----"

"All my life I have heard of the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a feat of architecture," replied his Aunt Caroline firmly. "I do not propose to have that view disturbed now."

"Perhaps it _was_ so, my dear love," put in momma deprecatingly, and Mr.

Dod, with a frenzied wink at poppa, called his attention to the ridiculous Pisan habit of putting immovable fringed carriage-tops on cabs.

"It undoubtedly was," said Mrs. Portheris, with an embattled front.

"But--Great Scott, aunt!" exclaimed poppa, recklessly, "think what this place was like--all marsh, with the sea right alongside; not four miles off as it is now. Why, you couldn't base so much as a calculation on it!"

"I must say," said Mrs. Portheris in severe surprise, "I knew that America had made great advances in the world of invention, but I did not expect to find what looks much like jealousy of the achievements of an older civilisation."

The Senator looked at his aunt, then he put his hat further back on his head and cleared his throat. I prepared for the worst, and the worst would undoubtedly have come if d.i.c.ky Dod had not suddenly remembered having seen a man with a foreign telegram looking for somebody in the Cathedral.

"It's a feat!" reiterated Mrs. Portheris as the Senator left us in pursuit of the man with the telegram.

"It's fourteen feet," cried the Senator from a safe distance, "out of the perpendicular!" and left us to take the consequences.

CHAPTER X.

When momma reported to me Mrs. Portheris's proposition that we should make the rest of our Continental trip as one undivided party, I found it difficult to understand.

"These sudden changes of temperature," I remarked, "are trying to the const.i.tution. Why this desire for the society of three unabashed Americanisms like ourselves?"

"That's just what I wondered," said momma. "For you can _see_ that she is full of insular prejudice against our great country. She makes no attempt to disguise it."

"She never did," I a.s.sented.

"She said it seemed so extraordinary--quite providential--meeting relatives abroad in this way," momma continued, "and she thought we ought to follow it up."

"Are we going to?" I inquired.

"My goodness gracious no, love! There are some things my nerves cannot stand the strain of, and one of them is your poppa's Aunt Caroline. The Senator smoothed it over. He said he was sure we were very much obliged, but our time was limited, and he thought we could get around faster alone."

"Well," I said, "I do not understand it, unless d.i.c.ky has persuaded her that poppa is to be our next amba.s.sador to St. James's."

"She was too silly about d.i.c.ky," said momma. "She said she really was afraid, before you appeared, that young Mr. Dod was conceiving an attachment for her Isabel, whose affections lay _quite_ in another direction; but now her mind was entirely at rest. I don't remember her words, she uses so many, but she was trying to hint that poor d.i.c.ky was an admirer of _yours_, dearest."

"I fancy she succeeded--as far as that goes," I remarked.

"Well, yes, she made me understand her. So I felt obliged to tell her that, though d.i.c.ky was a lovely fellow and we were all very fond of him, anything of _that_ kind was out of the question."

"And what," I asked, "was her reply to that?"

"She seemed to think I was prevaricating. She said she knew what a mother's hopes and fears were. They seem to take a very low view," added momma austerely, "of friends.h.i.+p between a young man and a young woman in England!"

"I should think so!" said I absent-mindedly. "d.i.c.ky hasn't made love to me for three years."

"_What!_"

"Nothing, momma, dear," I replied kindly. "Only I wouldn't contradict Mrs. Portheris again upon that point, if I were you. She will think it so improper if d.i.c.ky _isn't_ my admirer, don't you see?"

But Mrs. Portheris's desire to join our party stood revealed. Her constant chaperonage of d.i.c.ky was getting a little trying, and she wanted me to relieve her. I felt so deeply for them both, reflecting upon the situation, that I experienced quite a glow of virtue at the thought of my promise to d.i.c.ky to stay in Rome till his party arrived.

They were going to Siena--why, Mr. Dod could not undertake to explain--he had never heard of anything cheerful in connection with Siena.

"My idea is," said the Senator, "that in Rome"--we were on our way there--"we'll find our work cut out for us. Think of the objects of interest involved from Romulus and Remus down to the present Pope!"

"I should like my salts before I begin," said momma, pathetically.

"Over two thousand years," continued the Senator impressively, "and every year you may be sure has left its architectural imprint."

"Does Baedeker say that, Senator?" I asked, with a certain severity.

"No, the expression is entirely my own; you may take it down and use it freely. Two thousand years of remains is what we've got before us in Rome, and pretty well scattered too--nothing like the convenience of Pisa. I expect we shall have to allow at least four days for it. That Piazza del Duomo," continued poppa, thoughtfully, "seems to have been laid out with a view to the American tourist of the future. But I don't suppose that kind of forethought is common."

"How exquisite it was, that cl.u.s.ter of white marble relics of the past on the bosom of dusky Pisa. It reminded me," said momma, poetically, "of an old maid's pearls."

"I should suggest," said the Senator to me, "that you make a note of that. A little sentiment won't do us any harm--just a little. And they _are_ like an old maid's pearls in connection with that middle-aged, one-horse little city. Or I should say a widow's--Pisa was once a bride of the sea. A gra.s.s widow's," improved the Senator. "It's all meadow-land round there--did you notice?"

"I did not," I said coldly; "but, of course, if I'm to call Pisa a gra.s.s widow, it will have to be. Although I warn you, poppa, that in case of any critic being able to arise and indicate that it is laid out in oyster beds, I shall make it plain that the responsibility is yours."

We were speeding through Tuscany, and the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards clasped hands and danced along with us. The sky would have told us we were in Italy if we had come on a magic carpet without a compa.s.s or a time-table. Poppa says we are not, under any circ.u.mstances, to mention it more than once, but that we might as well explode the fallacy that there is anything like it in America. There isn't. Our cerulean is very beautifully blue, but in Italy one discovers by contrast that it is an intellectual blue, filled with light, high, provocative. The sky that bends over Tuscany is the very soul of blue, deep, soft, intense, impenetrable--the sky that one sees in those little casual bits of landscape behind the shoulders of pre-Raphaelite Saints and Madonnas; and here and there a lake, giving it back with delight, and now and then the long slope of a hill, with an old yellow-walled town creeping up, castle crowned, and raggedly trimmed with olives; and so many ruins that the Senator, summoned by momma to look at the last in view, regarded it with disparagement, which he did not attempt to conceal. He wondered, he said, that the Italian Government wasn't ashamed of having such a lot of them. They might be picturesque, but they weren't creditable; they gave you the impression that the country was on the down grade. "You needn't call my attention to any more of them, Augusta," he added; "but if you see any building that looks like progress, now, anything that gives you the idea of modern improvements inside, I shouldn't like to miss it."

And he returned to the thirty-second page of the Sunday _New York World_.