第 98 页

third floor, added the servant. He must knock at the little door on the

right-hand side of the landing there.

On the very first landing, however, the priest found himself face to face

with the young Count who was there receiving the contractors, and who on

recognising him became frightfully pale. They had not met since the

tragedy at the Boccanera mansion, and Pierre well realised how greatly

his glance disturbed that man, what a troublesome recollection of moral

complicity it evoked, and what mortal dread lest he should have guessed

the truth.

"Have you come to see me, have you something to tell me?" the Count

inquired.

"No, I am leaving Rome, I have come to wish your father good-bye."

Prada's pallor increased at this, and his whole face quivered: "Ah! it is

to see my father. He is not very well, be gentle with him," he replied,

and as he spoke, his look of anguish clearly proclaimed what he feared

from Pierre, some imprudent word, perhaps even a final mission, the

malediction of that man and woman whom he had killed. And surely if his

father knew, he would die as well. "Ah! how annoying it is," he resumed,

"I can't go up with you! There are gentlemen waiting for me. Yes, how

annoyed I am. As soon as possible, however, I will join you, yes, as soon

as possible."

He knew not how to stop the young priest, whom he must evidently allow to

remain with his father, whilst he himself stayed down below, kept there

by his pecuniary worries. But how distressful were the eyes with which he

watched Pierre climb the stairs, how he seemed to supplicate him with his

whole quivering form. His father, good Lord, the only true love, the one

great, pure, faithful passion of his life!

"Don't make him talk too much, brighten him, won't you?" were his parting

words.

Up above it was not Batista, the devoted ex-soldier, who opened the door,

but a very young fellow to whom Pierre did not at first pay any

attention. The little room was bare and light as on previous occasions,

and from the broad curtainless window there was the superb view of Rome,

Rome crushed that day beneath a leaden sky and steeped in shade of

infinite mournfulness. Old Orlando, however, had in no wise changed, but

still displayed the superb head of an old blanched lion, a powerful

muzzle and youthful eyes, which yet sparkled with the passions which had

growled in a soul of fire. Pierre found the stricken hero in the same

arm-chair as previously, near the same table littered with newspapers,

and with his legs buried in the same black wrapper, as if he were there

immobilised in a sheath of stone, to such a point that after months and

years one was sure to perceive him quite unchanged, with living bust, and

face glowing with strength and intelligence.

That grey day, however, he seemed gloomy, low in spirits. "Ah! so here

you are, my dear Monsieur Froment," he exclaimed, "I have been thinking

of you these three days past, living the awful days which you must have

lived in that tragic Palazzo Boccanera. Ah, God! What a frightful

bereavement! My heart is quite overwhelmed, these newspapers have again

just upset me with the fresh details they give!" He pointed as he spoke

to the papers scattered over the table. Then with a gesture he strove to

brush aside the gloomy story, and banish that vision of Benedetta dead,

which had been haunting him. "Well, and yourself?" he inquired.

"I am leaving this evening," replied Pierre, "but I did not wish to quit

Rome without pressing your brave hands."

"You are leaving? But your book?"

"My book--I have been received by the Holy Father, I have made my

submission and reprobated my book."

Orlando looked fixedly at the priest. There was a short interval of

silence, during which their eyes told one another all that they had to

tell respecting the affair. Neither felt the necessity of any longer

explanation. The old man merely spoke these concluding words: "You have

done well, your book was a chimera."

"Yes, a chimera, a piece of childishness, and I have condemned it myself

in the name of truth and reason."

A smile appeared on the dolorous lips of the impotent hero. "Then you

have seen things, you understand and know them now?"

"Yes, I know them; and that is why I did not wish to go off without

having that frank conversation with you which we agreed upon."

Orlando was delighted, but all at once he seemed to remember the young

fellow who had opened the door to Pierre, and who had afterwards modestly

resumed his seat on a chair near the window. This young fellow was a

youth of twenty, still beardless, of a blonde handsomeness such as

occasionally flowers at Naples, with long curly hair, a lily-like

complexion, a rosy mouth, and soft eyes full of a dreamy languor. The old

man presented him in fatherly fashion, Angiolo Mascara his name was, and

he was the grandson of an old comrade in arms, the epic Mascara of the

Thousand, who had died like a hero, his body pierced by a hundred wounds.

"I sent for him to scold him," continued Orlando with a smile. "Do you

know that this fine fellow with his girlish airs goes in for the new

ideas? He is an Anarchist, one of the three or four dozen Anarchists that

we have in Italy. He's a good little lad at bottom, he has only his

mother left him, and supports her, thanks to the little berth which he

holds, but which he'll lose one of these fine days if he is not careful.

Come, come, my child, you must promise me to be reasonable."

Thereupon Angiolo, whose clean but well-worn garments bespoke decent

poverty, made answer in a grave and musical voice: "I am reasonable, it

is the others, all the others who are not. When all men are reasonable

and desire truth and justice, the world will be happy."

"Ah! if you fancy that he'll give way!" cried Orlando. "But, my poor

child, just ask Monsieur l'Abbe if one ever knows where truth and justice

are. Well, well, one must leave you the time to live, and see, and

understand things."

Then, paying no more attention to the young man, he returned to Pierre,

while Angiolo, remaining very quiet in his corner, kept his eyes ardently

fixed on them, and with open, quivering ears lost not a word they said.

"I told you, my dear Monsieur Froment," resumed Orlando, "that your ideas

would change, and that acquaintance with Rome would bring you to accurate

views far more readily than any fine speeches I could make to you. So I

never doubted but what you would of your own free will withdraw your book

as soon as men and things should have enlightened you respecting the

Vatican at the present day. But let us leave the Vatican on one side,

there is nothing to be done but to let it continue falling slowly and

inevitably into ruin. What interests me is our Italian Rome, which you

treated as an element to be neglected, but which you have now seen and

studied, so that we can both speak of it with the necessary knowledge!"

He thereupon at once granted a great many things, acknowledged that

blunders had been committed, that the finances were in a deplorable

state, and that there were serious difficulties of all kinds. They, the

Italians, had sinned by excess of legitimate pride, they had proceeded

too hastily with their attempt to improvise a great nation, to change

ancient Rome into a great modern capital as by the mere touch of a wand.

And thence had come that mania for erecting new districts, that mad

speculation in land and shares, which had brought the country within a

hair's breadth of bankruptcy.

At this Pierre gently interrupted him to tell him of the view which he

himself had arrived at after his peregrinations and studies through Rome.

"That fever of the first hour, that financial _debacle_," said he, "is

after all nothing. All pecuniary sores can be healed. But the grave point

is that your Italy still remains to be created. There is no aristocracy

left, and as yet there is no people, nothing but a devouring middle

class, dating from yesterday, which preys on the rich harvest of the

future before it is ripe."

Silence fell. Orlando sadly wagged his old leonine head. The cutting

harshness of Pierre's formula struck him in the heart. "Yes, yes," he

said at last, "that is so, you have seen things plainly; and why say no

when facts are there, patent to everybody? I myself had already spoken to

you of that middle class which hungers so ravenously for place and

office, distinctions and plumes, and which at the same time is so

avaricious, so suspicious with regard to its money which it invests in

banks, never risking it in agriculture or manufactures or commerce,

having indeed the one desire to enjoy life without doing anything, and so

unintelligent that it cannot see it is killing its country by its

loathing for labour, its contempt for the poor, its one ambition to live

in a petty way with the barren glory of belonging to some official

administration. And, as you say, the aristocracy is dying, discrowned,

ruined, sunk into the degeneracy which overtakes races towards their

close, most of its members reduced to beggary, the others, the few who

have clung to their money, crushed by heavy imposts, possessing nought

but dead fortunes which constant sharing diminishes and which must soon

disappear with the princes themselves. And then there is the people,

which has suffered so much and suffers still, but is so used to suffering

that it can seemingly conceive no idea of emerging from it, blind and

deaf as it is, almost regretting its ancient bondage, and so ignorant, so

abominably ignorant, which is the one cause of its hopeless, morrowless

misery, for it has not even the consolation of understanding that if we

have conquered and are trying to resuscitate Rome and Italy in their

ancient glory, it is for itself, the people, alone. Yes, yes, no

aristocracy left, no people as yet, and a middle class which really

alarms one. How can one therefore help yielding at times to the terrors

of the pessimists, who pretend that our misfortunes are as yet nothing,

that we are going forward to yet more awful catastrophes, as though,

indeed, what we now behold were but the first symptoms of our race's end,

the premonitory signs of final annihilation!"

As he spoke he raised his long quivering arms towards the window, towards

the light, and Pierre, deeply moved, remembered how Cardinal Boccanera on

the previous day had made a similar gesture of supplicant distress when

appealing to the divine power. And both men, Cardinal and patriot, so

hostile in their beliefs, were instinct with the same fierce and

despairing grandeur.

"As I told you, however, on the first day," continued Orlando, "we only

sought to accomplish logical and inevitable things. As for Rome, with her

past history of splendour and domination which weighs so heavily upon us,

we could not do otherwise than take her for capital, for she alone was

the bond, the living symbol of our unity at the same time as the promise

of eternity, the renewal offered to our great dream of resurrection and

glory."

He went on, recognising the disastrous conditions under which Rome

laboured as a capital. She was a purely decorative city with exhausted

soil, she had remained apart from modern life, she was unhealthy, she

offered no possibility of commerce or industry, she was invincibly preyed

upon by death, standing as she did amidst that sterile desert of the

Campagna. Then he compared her with the other cities which are jealous of

her; first Florence, which, however, has become so indifferent and so

sceptical, impregnated with a happy heedlessness which seems inexplicable

when one remembers the frantic passions, and the torrents of blood

rolling through her history; next Naples, which yet remains content with

her bright sun, and whose childish people enjoy their ignorance and

wretchedness so indolently that one knows not whether one ought to pity

them; next Venice, which has resigned herself to remaining a marvel of

ancient art, which one ought to put under glass so as to preserve her

intact, slumbering amid the sovereign pomp of her annals; next Genoa,

which is absorbed in trade, still active and bustling, one of the last

queens of that Mediterranean, that insignificant lake which was once the

opulent central sea, whose waters carried the wealth of the world; and

then particularly Turin and Milan, those industrial and commercial

centres, which are so full of life and so modernised that tourists

disdain them as not being "Italian" cities, both of them having saved

themselves from ruin by entering into that Western evolution which is

preparing the next century. Ah! that old land of Italy, ought one to

leave it all as a dusty museum for the pleasure of artistic souls, leave

it to crumble away, even as its little towns of Magna Graecia, Umbria,

and Tuscany are already crumbling, like exquisite _bibelots_ which one

dares not repair for fear that one might spoil their character. At all

events, there must either be death, death soon and inevitable, or else

the pick of the demolisher, the tottering walls thrown to the ground, and

cities of labour, science, and health created on all sides; in one word,

a new Italy really rising from the ashes of the old one, and adapted to

the new civilisation into which humanity is entering.

"However, why despair?" Orlando continued energetically. "Rome may weigh

heavily on our shoulders, but she is none the less the summit we coveted.

We are here, and we shall stay here awaiting events. Even if the

population does not increase it at least remains stationary at a figure

of some 400,000 souls, and the movement of increase may set in again when

the causes which stopped it shall have ceased. Our blunder was to think

that Rome would become a Paris or Berlin; but, so far, all sorts of

social, historical, even ethnical considerations seem opposed to it; yet