“With what?”
“The landscape. It’s too full of every possible interest. What a history is written all over it, public and private! If you don’t take it simply like any other landscape, it becomes an oppression. It’s well that tourists come to Italy so ignorant, and keep so. Otherwise they couldn’t live to get home again; the past would crush them.”
Imogene scrutinised him as if to extract some personal meaning from his words, and then turned her head away. The clergyman addressed him with what was like a respectful toleration of the drolleries of a gifted but eccentric man, the flavour of whose talk he was beginning to taste.
“You don’t really mean that one shouldn’t come to Italy as well informed as possible?”
“Well, I did,” said Colville, “but I don’t.”
The young man pondered this, and Imogene started up with an air of rescuing them from each other—as if she would not let Mr. Morton think Colville trivial or Colville consider the clergyman stupid, but would do what she could to take their minds off the whole question. Perhaps she was not very clear as to how this was to be done; at any rate she did not speak, and Mrs. Bowen came to her support, from whatever motive of her own. It might have been from a sense of the injustice of letting Mr. Morton suffer from the complications that involved herself and the others. The affair had been going very hitchily ever since they started, with the burden of the conversation left to the two men and that helpless girl; if it were not to be altogether a failure she must interfere.
“Did you ever hear of Gratiano when you were in Venice?” she asked Mr. Morton.
“Is he one of their new watercolourists?” returned the young man. “I heard they had quite a school there now.”
“No,” said Mrs. Bowen, ignoring her failure as well as she could; “he was a famous talker; he loved to speak an infinite deal of nothing more than any man in Venice.”
“An ancestor of mine, Mr. Morton,” said Colville; “a poor, honest man, who did his best to make people forget that the ladies were silent. Thank you, Mrs. Bowen, for mentioning him. I wish he were with us today.”
The young man laughed. “Oh, in the Merchant of Venice!”
“No other,” said Colville.
“I confess,” said Mrs. Bowen, “that I am rather stupid this morning. I suppose it’s the softness of the air; it’s been harsh and irritating so long. It makes me drowsy.”
“Don’t mind us,” returned Colville. “We will call you at important points.” They were driving into a village at which people stop sometimes to admire the works of art in its church. “Here, for example, is—What place is this?” he asked of the coachman.
“San Domenico.”
“I should know it again by its beggars.” Of all ages and sexes they swarmed round the carriage, which the driver had instinctively slowed to oblige them, and thrust forward their hands and hats. Colville gave Effie his small change to distribute among them, at sight of which they streamed down the street from every direction. Those who had received brought forward the halt and blind, and did not scruple to propose being rewarded for this service. At the same time they did not mind his laughing in their faces; they laughed too, and went off content, or as nearly so as beggars ever are. He buttoned up his pocket as they drove on more rapidly. “I am the only person of no principle—except Effie—in the carriage, and yet I am at this moment carrying more blessings out of this village than I shall ever know what to do with. Mrs. Bowen, I know, is regarding me with severe disapproval. She thinks that I ought to have sent the beggars of San Domenico to Florence, where they would all be shut up in the Pia Casa di Ricovero, and taught some useful occupation. It’s terrible in Florence. You can walk through Florence now and have no appeal made to your better nature that is not made at the appellant’s risk of imprisonment. When I was there before, you had opportunities of giving at every turn.”
“You can send a cheque to the Pia Casa,” said Mrs. Bowen.
“Ah, but what good would that do me? When I give I want the pleasure of it; I want to see my beneficiary cringe under my bounty. But I’ve tried in vain to convince you that the world has gone wrong in other ways. Do you remember the one-armed man whom we used to give to on the Lung’ Arno? That persevering sufferer has been repeatedly arrested for mendicancy, and obliged to pay a fine out of his hard earnings to escape being sent to your Pia Casa.”
Mrs. Bowen smiled, and said, Was he living yet? in a pensive tone of reminiscence. She was even more than patient of Colville’s nonsense. It seemed to him that the light under her eyelids was sometimes a grateful light. Confronting Imogene and the young man whose hopes of her he was to destroy at the first opportunity, the lurid moral atmosphere which he breathed seemed threatening to become a thing apparent to sense, and to be about to blot the landscape. He fought it back as best he could, and kept the hovering cloud from touching the earth by incessant effort. At times he looked over the side of the carriage, and drew secretly a long breath of fatigue. It began to be borne in upon him that these ladies were using him ill in leaving him the burden of their entertainment. He became angry, but his heart softened, and he forgave them again, for he conjectured that he was the cause of the cares that kept them silent. He felt certain that the affair had taken some new turn. He wondered if Mrs. Bowen had told Imogene what she had demanded of him. But he could only conjecture and
