IV
Those first days in Rome tired Cornélie greatly. She did too much, as every one does who has just arrived in Rome; she wanted to take in the whole city at once; and the distances, although covered in a carriage, and the endless galleries in the museums resulted in producing physical exhaustion. Moreover she was constantly experiencing disappointments, in respect of pictures, statues or buildings. At first she dared not own to these disappointments; but one afternoon, feeling dead-tired, after she had been painfully disappointed in the Sistine Chapel, she owned up to herself. Everything that she saw that was already known to her from her previous studies disappointed her. Then she resolved to give sight-seeing a rest. And, after those fatiguing days, when every morning and every afternoon was spent out of doors, it was a luxury to surrender herself to the unconscious current of daily life. She remained at home in the mornings, wrapped in a tea-gown, in her cosy little bird-cage of a sitting-room, writing letters, dreaming a little, with her arms folded behind her head; she read Ovid and Petrarch, or listened to a couple of street-musicians, who, with their quavering tenors, to the shrill whining of their guitars, filled the silent street with a sobbing passion of music. At lunch she considered that she had been lucky in her pension, in her little corner at the table. She was interested in Baronin von Rothkirch, with her indifferent, aristocratic condescension towards Rudyard, because she saw how residence abroad can draw a person out of the narrow ring of caste principles. The young Baronesse, who cared nothing about life and merely sketched and painted, interested her because of her whispering intimacy with Rudyard, which she failed to understand. Miss Hope was so ingenious, so childishly irrational, that Cornélie could not imagine how old Hope, the rich stockinet-manufacturer over in Chicago, allowed this child to travel about alone, with her far too generous monthly allowance and her total ignorance of the world and people; and Rudyard himself, though she sometimes felt an aversion for him, attracted her in spite of that aversion. Although she had so far formed no deeper friendship with any of her fellow-boarders, at any rate they were people to whom she was able to talk; and the conversation at table was a diversion amid the solitude of the rest of the day.
For in the afternoons, during this period of fatigue and disappointment, she would merely go for a short walk by herself down the Corso or on the Pincio and then return home, make her own tea in her little silver tea-pot and sit dreaming by the log fire, in the dusk, until it was time to dress for dinner.
And the brightly-lit dining-room with the Guercino ceiling was gay and cheerful. The pension was crammed: the marchesa had given up her own room and was sleeping in the bath-room. A hum of voices buzzed around the tables; the waiters rushed to and fro; spoons and forks clattered. There was none of the melancholy spirit of so many tables-d’hôte. The people knew one another; and the excitement of Roman life, the oxygen in the Roman air seemed to lend an added vivacity to the gestures and conversation. Amidst this vivacity the two grimy æsthetic ladies attracted attention by their unvarying pose, with their eternal evening-dress, their Jaegers, their beads, the fat books which they read, their angry looks because people were talking.
After dinner they sat in the drawing-room or in the hall, made friends here and there and talked about Rome, Rome, Rome. There was always a great fuss about the music in the different churches: they consulted the Herald; they asked Rudyard, who knew everything, and gathered round him; and he, fat and polite as ever, smiled and distributed tickets and named the day and hour at which an important service would be held in this church or in that. To English ladies, who were not fully informed, he would now and then, as it were casually, impart details about the complexities of Catholic ritual and the Catholic hierarchy; he explained the nationalities denoted by the various colours of the seminarists whom you met in shoals of an afternoon on the Pincio, staring at St. Peter’s, in ecstasy over St. Peter’s, the mighty symbol of their mighty religion; he set forth the distinction between a church and a basilica; he related anecdotes of the private life of Leo XIII. His manner of speaking of all these things possessed an insinuating charm: the English ladies, greedy for information, hung on his lips, thought him too awfully nice, asked him for a thousand particulars.
These days were a great rest for Cornélie. She recovered from her fatigue and felt indifferent towards Rome. But she did not think of leaving any the sooner. Whether she was here or elsewhere was all the same to her: she had to be somewhere. Besides, the pension was good, her fellow-boarders pleasant and cheerful. She no longer read Hare’s Walks in Rome or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but she read Ouida’s Ariadne over again. She did not care for the book as much as she had done three years before, at the Hague; and after that she read nothing. But she amused herself with the von Rothkirch ladies for a whole evening, looking over Miss Hope’s album of seals and collection of patterns. How mad those Americans were on titles and royalties! The Baronin good-naturedly contributed an impression of her own arms to the album. And the patterns were greatly admired: gold brocades; silks heavily interwoven with silver; spangled tulles. Miss Hope related how she had come by them: she knew one of the queen’s waiting-women, who had formerly been in service with an American; and this waiting-woman was now able to procure the patterns for her at a high price: a precious bit of material picked up while the queen was trying on, or sometimes even cut out of a broad seam. The child was prouder of her collection of patterns than an Italian prince of his paintings, said Baronin von Rothkirch. But, notwithstanding this absurdity, this vanity, Cornélie came to like the pretty American girl because of her candid and unsophisticated nature. She looked most attractive in the evening, in a black low-cut dress, or in a rose chiffon blouse. For that matter, it was a different frock every night. She possessed a kaleidoscopic collection of dresses, blouses and jewels. She would walk through the ruins of the Forum in a tailor-made suit of cream cloth, lined with orange silk; and her white lace petticoat flitted airily over the foundations of the Basilica Julia or the Temple of Vesta. Her gaily-trimmed hats introduced patches of colour from Regent Street or the Avenue de l’Opéra into the tragic seriousness of the Colosseum or the ruined palace of the Palatine. The young Baronesse teased her about her orange silk lining, so in harmony with the Forum, about her hats, so in keeping with the seriousness of a place of Christian martyrdom, but she was never angry:
“It’s a nice hat anyway!” she would say, in her Yankee drawl, which always afforded a good view of her pretty teeth but made her strain her mouth as though she were cracking filberts.
And the child enjoyed everything, enjoyed the Baronin and the Baronesse, enjoyed being at a pension kept by a decayed Italian marchioness. And, as soon as she caught sight of the Marchesa Belloni’s grey, leonine head, she would make a rush for her—because a marchioness is higher than a baroness, said Madame von Rothkirch—drag her into a corner and if possible monopolize her throughout the evening. Rudyard would then join them; and Cornélie, seeing this, wondered what Rudyard was, who he was and what he was about. But this did not interest the Baronin, who had just received a card for a mass in the papal chapel; and the young Baronesse merely said that he told legends of the saints so nicely, when explaining the pictures to her in the Doria and the Corsini.
CHAPTER V
One evening Cornélie made the acquaintance of the Dutch family beside whom the Marchesa had first wished to place her at table: Mrs. van der Staal and her two daughters. They too were spending the whole winter in Rome: they had friends there and went out visiting. The conversation flowed smoothly; and mevrouw invited Cornélie to come and have a chat in her sitting-room. Next day she accompanied her new acquaintances to the Vatican and heard that mevrouw was expecting her son, who was coming to Rome from Florence to continue his archæological studies.
Cornélie was glad to meet at the hotel a Dutch element that was not antipathetic. She thought it pleasant to talk Dutch again and she confessed as much. In a day or two she had become intimate with Mrs. van der Staal and the two girls; and on the evening when young Van der Staal arrived she opened her heart more than she had ever thought that she could do to strangers whom she had known for barely a few days.
They