Cecilia Part 2

Guido made a gesture of indifference.

"You know very well that I am not a coward," he said.

"You will be, the day you are afraid to go on living," returned his friend. "If you kill yourself, I shall think you are an arrant coward, and I shall be sorry I ever knew you."

Guido looked at him incredulously.

"Are you in earnest?" he asked.

"Yes."

There was no mistaking the look in Lamberti's hard blue eyes. Guido faced him.

"Do you think that every man who commits suicide is a coward?"

"If it is to escape his own troubles, yes. A man who gives his life for his country, his mother, or his wife, is not a coward, though he may kill himself with his own hand."

"The Church would call him a suicide."

"I do not know, in all cases," said Lamberti. "I am not a theologian, and as the Church means nothing to you, it would be of no use if I were."

"Why do you say that the Church means nothing to me?" Guido asked.

"Since you are an atheist, what meaning can it possibly have?"

"It means the whole tradition of morality by which we live, and our fathers lived. Even the code of honour, which is a little out of shape nowadays, is based on Christianity, and was once the rule of a good life, the best rule in the days when it grew up."

"I daresay. Even the code of honour, degenerate as it is, and twist it how you will, cannot give you an excuse for killing yourself when you have always behaved honourably, or for running away from the enemy simply because you are tired of fighting and will not take the trouble to go on."

"Perhaps you are right," Guido answered. "But the whole question is not worth arguing. What is life, after all, that we should attach any importance to it?"

"It is all you have, and you only have it once."

"Who knows? Perhaps we may come back to it again, hundreds and hundreds of times. There are more people in the world who believe that than there are Christians."

"If that is what you believe," retorted Lamberti, "you must believe that the sooner you leave life, the sooner you will come back to it."

"Possibly. But there is a chance that it may not be true, and that everything may end here. That one chance may be worth taking."

"There is a chance that a man who deserts from his s.h.i.+p may not be caught. That is not an argument in favour of desertion."

Guido laughed carelessly.

"You have a most unpleasant way of naming things," he said. "Shall we go? It is growing late, and I have promised to see my aunt before dinner."

"Will there be any one else there?" asked Lamberti.

"Why? Did you think of going with me?"

"I might. It is a long time since I have called. I think I shall be a little more a.s.siduous in future."

"It is not gay, at my aunt's," observed Guido. "Monsieur Leroy will be there. You may have to shake hands with him!"

"You do not seem anxious that I should go with you," laughed Lamberti.

Guido said nothing for a moment, and seemed to be weighing the question, as if it might be of some importance. Lamberti afterwards remembered the slight hesitation.

"By all means come," Guido said, when he had made up his mind.

He glanced once more at the place, for he liked it, and it was pleasant to carry away pictures of what one liked, even of a bit of neglected old garden with a stone-pine in the middle, clearly cut out against the sky.

He wondered idly whether he should ever come again--whether, after all, it would be cowardly to go to sleep with the certainty of not waking, and whether he should find anything beyond, or not.

The world looked too familiar to him to be interesting, as if he had known it too long, and he vaguely wished that he could change it, and desire to stay in it for its own sake; and just then it occurred to him that every man carries with him the world in which he must live, the stage and the scenery for his own play. It would be absurd to pretend, he thought, that his own material world was the same as Lamberti's, even when the latter was at home. They knew the same people, heard the same talk, ate the same things, looked on the same sights, breathed the same air. There was perhaps no sacrifice worthy of honourable men which either of them would not make for the other. Yet, to Guido d'Este, life seemed miserably indifferent where it did not seem a real calamity, while to Lamberti every second of it was worth fighting for, because it was worth enjoying.

Guido looked at his friend's tanned neck and st.u.r.dy shoulders, following him to the door, and he realised more clearly than ever before that he was not of the same race. He felt the satiety bred in many generations of destiny's spoilt and flattered sons; the absence of anything like a grasping will, caused by the too easy fulfilment of every careless wish; the over-critical sense that guesses at hidden imperfection, the cruelly unerring instinct of a taste too tired to enjoy and yet too fine to be deceived.

Lamberti turned at the door and saw his face.

"What are you thinking about?"

"I was envying you," Guido murmured. "You are glad to be alive."

Lamberti made rather an impatient gesture, but said nothing. The Sister who had admitted the two opened the little iron door for them to go out.

She was a small woman, with a worn face and kind brown eyes, one of the half-dozen who live in the little convent and work among the children of the very poor in that quarter. Both men had taken out money.

"For the poor children, if you please," said Guido, placing his offering in the nun's hand.

"And tell them to pray for a man who is in trouble," added Lamberti, giving her money.

She looked at him curiously, thinking, perhaps, that he meant himself. Then she gravely bent her head.

"I thank you very much," she said.

The small iron door closed with a rusty clang, and the friends began to descend the steep way that leads down from the Porta San Pancrazio to the Via Garibaldi.

"Why did you say that to the nun?" asked Guido.

"Are you past praying for?" enquired Lamberti, with a careless and good-natured laugh.

"It is not like you," said Guido.

"I do not pretend to be more consistent than other people, you know. Are you going directly to the Princess's?"

"No. I must go home first. The old lady would never forgive me if I went to see her without a silk hat in my hand."

"Then I suppose I must dress, too," said Lamberti. "I will leave you at your door, and drive home, and we can meet at your aunt's."

"Very well."