“I shall be ashamed to complain if I do.”
“And you didn’t go to Rome after all?” said Mr. Waters.
“No; I couldn’t face the landlord with a petition so preposterous as mine. I told him that I found I had no money to pay his bill till I had seen my banker, and as he didn’t propose that I should send him the amount back from Rome, I stayed. Landlords have their limitations; they are not imaginative, as a class.”
“Well, a day more will make no great difference to you, I suppose,” said the old man, “and a day less would have been a loss to me. I shall miss you.”
“Shall you, indeed?” asked Colville, with a grateful stir of the heart. “It’s very nice of you to say that.”
“Oh no. I meet few people who are willing to look at life objectively with me, and I have fancied some such willingness in you. What I chiefly miss over here is a philosophic lift in the human mind, but probably that is because my opportunities of meeting the best minds are few, and my means of conversing with them are small. If I had not the whole past with me, I should feel lonely at times.”
“And is the past such good company always?”
“Yes, in a sense it is. The past is humanity set free from circumstance, and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised.”
As if he found this rarefied air too thin for his lungs, Colville made some ineffectual gasps at response, and the old man continued: “What I mean is that I meet here the characters I read of, and commune with them before their errors were committed, before they had condemned themselves to failure, while they were still wise and sane, and still active and vital forces.”
“Did they all fail? I thought some of the bad fellows had a pretty fair worldly success?”
“The blossom of decay.”
“Oh! what black pessimism!”
“Not at all! Men fail, but man succeeds. I don’t know what it all means, or any part of it; but I have had moods in which it seemed as if the whole, secret of the mystery were about to flash upon me. Walking along in the full sun, in the midst of men, or sometimes in the solitude of midnight, poring over a book, and thinking of quite other things, I have felt that I had almost surprised it.”
“But never quite?”
“Oh, it isn’t too late yet.”
“I hope you won’t have your revelation before I get away from Florence, or I shall see them burning you here like the great frate.”
They had been walking down the Via Calzioli from the Duomo, and now they came out into the Piazza della Signoria, suddenly, as one always seems to do, upon the rise of the old palace and the leap of its tower into the blue air. The history of all Florence is there, with memories of every great time in bronze or marble, but the supreme presence is the martyr who hangs forever from the gibbet over the quenchless fire in the midst.
“Ah, they had to kill him!” sighed the old man. “It has always been so with the benefactors. They have always meant mankind more good than any one generation can bear, and it must turn upon them and destroy them.”
“How will it be with you, then, when you have read us ‘the riddle of the painful earth’?”
“That will be so simple that everyone will accept it willingly and gladly, and wonder that no one happened to think of it before. And, perhaps, the world is now grown old enough and docile enough to receive the truth without resentment.”
“I take back my charge of pessimism,” said Colville. “You are an optimist of the deepest dye.”
They walked out of the Piazza and down to the Lung’ Arno, through the corridor of the Uffizzi, where the illustrious Florentines stand in marble under the arches, all reconciled and peaceful and equal at last. Colville shivered a little as he passed between the silent ranks of the statues.
“I can’t stand those fellows, today. They seem to feel such a smirk satisfaction at having got out of it all.”
They issued upon the river, and he went to the parapet and looked down on the water. “I wonder,” he mused aloud, “if it has the same Sunday look to these Sabbathless Italians as it has to us.”
“No; Nature isn’t puritan,” replied the old minister.
“Not at Haddam East Village?”
“No; there less than here; for she’s had to make a harder fight for her life there.”
“Ah, then you believe in Nature—you’re a friend of Nature?” asked Colville, following the lines of an oily swirl in the current with indolent eye.
“Only up to a certain point.” Mr. Waters seemed to be patient of any direction which the other might be giving the talk. “Nature is a savage. She has good impulses, but you can’t trust her altogether.”
“Do you know,” said Colville, “I don’t think there’s very much of her left in us after we reach a certain point in life? She drives us on at a great pace for a while, and then some fine morning we wake up and find that Nature has got tired of us and has left us to taste and conscience. And taste and conscience are by no means so certain of what they want you to do as Nature was.”
“Yes,” said the minister, “I see what you mean.” He joined Colville in leaning on the parapet, and he looked out on the river as if he saw his meaning there. “But by the time we reach that point in life most of us have got the direction which Nature meant us to take, and there’s no longer any need of her driving us on.”
“And what about
