She had not seen the Baronne for what seemed to her a very long while. The last time had been in Paris, when she and her father and mother had stayed at the Hôtel Meurice for a fortnight. The memory of that time, which seemed so unutterably bright in the retrospect, brought the ready tears to Zella's eyes.
She felt rather nervous, though she would not have acknowledged it, and wondered if Grand'mère would make any allusion to her mother. If so, Zella thought, she would very likely begin to cry.
But when they were admitted, by a smiling and bowing man-servant in a white apron, into the small salon, Zella perceived that there was to be no display of emotion.
The Baronne de Kervoyou, stouter than ever, rose with difficulty from her chair, said, " Ah, mon ami, vous voila!" very quietly and kissed her stepson on both cheeks.
She gave her hand to Zella, who curtseyed very prettily, and then stooped and kissed her forehead.
"Stéphanie!"
Stéphanie de Kervoyou, hovering in the background, came forward eagerly to greet her half-brother, and spoke kindly and affectionately to Zella. The conversation for the first few moments was entirely of the journey, of the rooms engaged by Stéphanie at the pension in Via Veneto, for Louis and his daughter, and of their arrival on the previous night.
Zella sat silent. She looked at Grand'mère, and wished, as she had often wished before, that Grand'mère wore more of the aspect that youthful romance would fain attribute to a Baronne de Kervoyou, descended from the Royal House of Orleans, and united by marriage to that ancient and honourable Huguenot family of which Zella's father was the last representative.
The Baronne was seventy years of age, exceedingly stout, and magnificently upright. Her white hair was drawn back from her large, plain old face under a small black lace mantilla, and she habitually wore the stiffest of black silk dresses. She had never been beautiful, and had known such poverty as only the impoverished aristocracy of France can know, until her marriage, at twenty-seven, to Andre de Kervoyou. Her family had looked upon her tardy alliance with the rich Breton widower as a mésalliance ; for the title was of Huguenot creation, whereas the oldest blood of a Royal Family ran in the veins of the poor and unbeautiful Gisele de la Claudiere de Marincourt. She never mentioned the fact, and never forgot it.
The solitary weakness of her life had been her marriage with un protestant.
She had failed to fulfil the many injunctions laid upon her by her confesseur to convert Andre de Kervoyou and his little son, whose mother had been an Englishwoman. And on the condition that she would never attempt to do so, the Baron, when his daughter Stéphanie was born, had allowed her to be baptized into her mother's faith.
Her word given, the Baronne kept it faithfully, even against the peremptory advice of her confesseur, when her husband had died before his son was five years old.
The Baronne changed her confesseur, and confided the religious instruction of her stepson to a ministre protestant of her acquaintance.
She never indulged in remorse, and was wont to say, when remonstrated with by her scandalized Catholic relations: "A promise is a promise. One does not go back upon one's word. Ca ne se fait pas." The words were characteristic of her. "Pour moi, quand on a dit Ca ne se fait pas, on a tout dit," she would admit, with her curt laugh.
Zella, who remembered the aphorism of old, supposed that a display of emotion was among the things that are not done, since Grand'mère was imperturbably discussing with her father the exceedingly dull and impersonal matter of a recent change of Ministry in France.
She looked at Tante Stéphanie, who had at once taken up her interminable embroidery.
She was a thin, sallow edition of her mother, her fine, straight brown hair brushed back from a high forehead and pushed slightly forward, her complexion colourless, and her aquiline nose ornamented by gold-rimmed pince-nez.
Tante Stéphanie had not changed.
Although Zella did not know it, Stéphanie de Kervoyou had hardly changed at all in the last twenty years. She had looked equally middle-aged as a pensionnaire, as a young girl, and as a spinster who had long since coiffee Ste. Catherine.
Presently she turned to Zella, and said:
"Your first visit to Rome, child! I look forward to showing you all the beautiful churches and galleries and buildings. St. Peter's, of course, must be your first visit.''
Her voice, low and musical, was her sole charm.
"I am longing to see it all," said Zella rather timidly. She was not sure of any artistic tendencies in herself, but her most passionate desire, as always, was to adapt herself to her surroundings.
"You must let me take her out this afternoon, Louis," said Stéphanie eagerly. "It will be a treat for me to have a companion. I do not know if you are busy?"
"Not at all; and if you will lunch with me at the pension we could all go to St. Peter's together. Provided that my mother can spare you?" he added, turning respectfully to the Baronne.
"But certainly, my dear son," she replied courteously.
Zella, fresh from the Lloyd-Evans household, where such social amenities as were habitual to the Baronne and her family would certainly have been stigmatized as foreign at the best, and affected at the worst, became slightly bewildered. She felt as though she had been suddenly thrust into a new world, whose standards, though more in accord with those of her own perceptions than were those of the world she had just left, were nevertheless slightly unfamiliar. With characteristic adaptability she made haste to readjust her point of view.
It did not take Zella long to recognize that the whole of her Aunt Stéphanie's enthusiasms were centred upon the Catholic Church and Classical Art. She seldom spoke to Zella of the former, although they visited many churches together, where Zella knelt silently beside the devoutly inclined figure of her aunt, in front of gaudily decked altars erected before coloured plaster statues that seemed to Zella for the most part masterpieces of bad taste. She could not understand how Tante Stéphanie, who loved beauty, could be moved to enthusiasm before these unlife-like representations of men and women whom Zella, with a scepticism quite unconsciously imbibed from her parents, cynically supposed to have been medieval impostors or mythical creations of a crafty and superstitious priesthood.
It may be supposed that Stéphanie de Kervoyou, praying earnestly and hopefully as she daily did, that the gift of faith might be vouchsafed to her beloved brother and his little daughter, remained unconscious of the thoughts passing through the youthful mind of her niece as they explored one church after another.
"Look, Zella," said Stéphanie, in the Roman Forum.
The sky was brilliant above them, and Zella saw massive stones and innumerable ruins all round. She gazed silently, thinking more of what she should presently say about it, than of what lay before her eyes. It was all very wonderful, and one slender section of an arch, three rough pillars with two great stones laid over them, stood out prominently above the surrounding groups of masonry. Zella wondered if she should admire that. Presently Tante Stéphanie pointed to it, and said:
"That is one of the most beautiful things in Rome— the Arch of Titus. It was built by the Emperor when "•
The explanation was unheard by Zella, who was lost in the vexation of not having trusted to her own artistic perceptions, and shown Tante Stéphanie, by a well-timed exclamation of enthusiastic admiration, how capable she was of instinctively seizing upon the best, without waiting to have it pointed out to her.
Zella's own artistic perceptions, however, were not to be implicitly relied upon, and on more than one occasion she received proof of this. Her cry of admiration at sight of the great glittering Memoriale to Victor Emmanuel /at the corner of the Piazza Venezia was a genuine and spontaneous tribute to the garish beauty of the huge white and gilt erection standing out in bold relief against the brilliant blue of the sky. But Tante Stéphanie, after y the delicate