The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
can be," said Helen. "He's going to Italy, because I noticed green tickets
in his book." Miss Winchelsea almost told them of the poetry, and decided
not to do so. And presently the carriage windows seized hold upon them and
the young man was forgotten. It made them feel that they were doing an
educated sort of thing to travel through a country whose commonest
advertisements were in idiomatic French, and Miss Winchelsea made
unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board
advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that deface
the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really uninteresting
country, and after a time Fanny reverted to Hare's _Walks_, and Helen
initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy reverie; she had
been trying to realise, she said, that she was actually going to Rome, but
she perceived at Helen's suggestion that she was hungry, and they lunched
out of their baskets very cheerfully. In the afternoon they were tired and
silent until Helen made tea. Miss Winchelsea might have dozed, only she
knew Fanny slept with her mouth open; and as their fellow-passengers were
two rather nice, critical-looking ladies of uncertain age--who knew French
well enough to talk it--she employed herself in keeping Fanny awake. The
rhythm of the train became insistent, and the streaming landscape outside
became at last quite painful to the eye. They were already dreadfully
tired of travelling before their night's stoppage came.
The stoppage for the night was brightened by the appearance of the young
man, and his manners were all that could be desired and his French quite
serviceable.
His coupons availed for the same hotel as theirs, and by chance, as it
seemed, he sat next Miss Winchelsea at the _table d'hôte._ In spite
of her enthusiasm for Rome, she had thought out some such possibility very
thoroughly, and when he ventured to make a remark upon the tediousness of
travelling--he let the soup and fish go by before he did this--she did not
simply assent to his proposition, but responded with another. They were
soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and Fanny were cruelly overlooked
in the conversation.. It was to be the same journey, they found; one day
for the galleries at Florence--"from what I hear," said the young man, "it
is barely enough,"--and the rest at Rome. He talked of Rome very
pleasantly; he was evidently quite well read, and he quoted Horace about
Soracte. Miss Winchelsea had "done" that book of Horace for her
matriculation, and was delighted to cap his quotation. It gave a sort of
tone to things, this incident--a touch of refinement to mere chatting.
Fanny expressed a few emotions, and Helen interpolated a few sensible
remarks, but the bulk of the talk on the girls' side naturally fell to
Miss Winchelsea.
Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party. They
did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught, and Miss
Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer. At any rate he
was something of that sort, something gentlemanly and refined without
being opulent and impossible. She tried once or twice to ascertain whether
he came from Oxford or Cambridge, but he missed her timid opportunities.
She tried to get him to make remarks about those places to see if he would
say "come up" to them instead of "go down,"--she knew that was how you
told a 'Varsity man. He used the word "'Varsity"--not university--in quite
the proper way.
They saw as much of Mr. Ruskin's Florence as the brief time permitted; he
met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting brightly,
and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew a great deal
about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go
round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially
while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of
a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a
distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being
vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a
grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons
of the pictures. Fanny went softly among these masterpieces; she admitted
"she knew so little about them," and she confessed that to her they were
"all beautiful." Fanny's "beautiful" inclined to be a little monotonous,
Miss Winchelsea thought. She had been quite glad when the last sunny Alp
had vanished, because of the staccato of Fanny's admiration. Helen said
little, but Miss Winchelsea had found her a trifle wanting on the
aesthetic side in the old days and was not surprised; sometimes she
laughed at the young man's hesitating, delicate jests and sometimes she
didn't, and sometimes she seemed quite lost to the art about them in the
contemplation of the dresses of the other visitors.
At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather "touristy"
friend of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss
Winchelsea. "I have only two short weeks in Rome," he said, "and my friend
Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli looking at a waterfall."
"What is your friend Leonard?" asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.
"He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met," the young man
replied--amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought.
They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what they would
have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest and Fanny's enormous
capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never flagged--through
pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded churches, ruins and
museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts and palaces, they
admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a stone pine or a
eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never glimpsed Soracte but
they exclaimed. Their common ways were made wonderful by imaginative play.
"Here Caesar may have walked," they would say. "Raphael may have seen
Soracte from this very point." They happened on the tomb of Bibulus. "Old
Bibulus," said the young man. "The oldest monument of Republican Rome!"
said Miss Winchelsea.
"I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who _was_ Bibulus?"
There was a curious little pause.
"Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.
The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. "That was Balbus," he
said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw any light
upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.
Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always
taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things like
that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and told him
where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they had, these young
people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories that was once the
world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the time. They said indeed
that the electric trams and the '70 buildings, and that criminal
advertisement that glares upon the Forum, outraged their aesthetic
feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of the fun. And indeed Rome
is such a wonderful place that it made Miss Winchelsea forget some of her
most carefully prepared enthusiasms at times, and Helen, taken unawares,
would suddenly admit the beauty of unexpected things. Yet Fanny and Helen
would have liked a shop window or so in the English quarter if Miss
Winchelsea's uncompromising hostility to all other English visitors had
not rendered that district impossible.
The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the
scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling. The
exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite admiration
by playing her "beautiful" with vigour, and saying "Oh! _let's_ go,"
with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was mentioned. But
Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the end that
disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to see "anything" in
the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's Beatrice Cenci!--in the Barberini
Gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the electric trams, she
said rather snappishly that "people must get about somehow, and it's
better than torturing horses up these horrid little hills." She spoke of
the Seven Hills of Rome as "horrid little hills "!
And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea did not know
of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry like that, my dear;
_they_ don't want us to overtake them. And we don't say the right
things for them when we _do_ get near."
"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her excessive
pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of breath.
But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came to
look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised how happy
she had been pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and exchanging the
very highest class of information the human mind can possess, the most
refined impressions it is possible to convey. Insensibly emotion crept
into their intercourse, sunning itself openly and pleasantly at last when
Helen's modernity was not too near. Insensibly their interest drifted from
the wonderful associations about them to their more intimate and personal
feelings. In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke
allusively of her school, of her examination successes, of her gladness
that the days of "Cram" were over. He made it quite clear that he also was
a teacher. They spoke of the greatness of their calling, of the necessity
of sympathy to face its irksome details, of a certain loneliness they
sometimes felt.
That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day, because
Helen returned with Fanny--she had taken her into the upper galleries. Yet
the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already vivid and concrete enough,
became now realistic in the highest degree. She figured that pleasant
young man lecturing in the most edifying way to his students, herself
modestly prominent as his intellectual mate and helper; she figured a
refined little home, with two bureaus, with white shelves of high-class
books, and autotypes of the pictures of Rossetti and Burne Jones, with
Morris's wall-papers and flowers in pots of beaten copper. Indeed she
figured many things. On the Pincio the two had a few precious moments
together, while Helen marched Fanny off to see the _muro Torto_, and
he spoke at once plainly. He said he hoped their friendship was only
beginning, that he already found her company very precious to him, that
indeed it was more than that.
He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers as
though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should of course,"
he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my
speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental--or
providential--and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a
lonely tour ... and I have been so very happy, so very happy. Quite
recently I have found myself in a position--I have dared to think----,
And----"
He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said "Demn!" quite
distinctly--and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse into
profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He drew
nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was almost a
grin. "I've been looking for you everywhere, Snooks," he said. "You
promised to be on the Piazza steps half-an-hour ago."
Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face. She did
not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard must have