Chapter IX.
A Roman Holiday
“Oh dear!” said Mrs. Ashe, as she folded her letters and laid them aside, “I wish those Pages would go away from Nice, or else that the frigates were not there.”
“Why! what’s the matter?” asked Katy, looking up from the many-leaved journal from Clover over which she was poring.
“Nothing is the matter except that those everlasting people haven’t gone to Spain yet, as they said they would, and Ned seems to keep on seeing them,” replied Mrs. Ashe, petulantly.
“But, dear Polly, what difference does it make? And they never did promise you to go on any particular time, did they?”
“N-o, they didn’t; but I wish they would, all the same. Not that Ned is such a goose as really to care anything for that foolish Lilly!” Then she gave a little laugh at her own inconsistency, and added, “But I oughtn’t to abuse her when she is your cousin.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Katy, cheerfully. “But, really, I don’t see why poor Lilly need worry you so, Polly dear.”
The room in which this conversation took place was on the very topmost floor of the Hotel del Hondo in Rome. It was large and many-windowed; and though there was a little bed in one corner half hidden behind a calico screen, with a bureau and washing-stand, and a sort of stout mahogany hat-tree on which Katy’s dresses and jackets were hanging, the remaining space, with a sofa and easy-chairs grouped round a fire, and a round table furnished with books and a lamp, was ample enough to make a good substitute for the private sitting-room which Mrs. Ashe had not been able to procure on account of the near approach of the Carnival and the consequent crowding of strangers to Rome. In fact, she was assured that under the circumstances she was lucky in finding rooms as good as these; and she made the most of the assurance as a consolation for the somewhat unsatisfactory food and service of the hotel, and the four long flights of stairs which must be passed every time they needed to reach the dining-room or the street door.
The party had been in Rome only four days, but already they had seen a host of interesting things. They had stood in the strange sunken space with its marble floor and broken columns, which is all that is left of the great Roman Forum. They had visited the Coliseum, at that period still overhung with ivy garlands and trailing greeneries, and not, as now, scraped clean and bare and “tidied” out of much of its picturesqueness. They had seen the Baths of Caracalla and the Temple of Janus and St. Peter’s and the Vatican marbles, and had driven out on the Campagna and to the Pamphili-Doria Villa to gather purple and red anemones, and to the English cemetery to see the grave of Keats. They had also peeped into certain shops, and attended a reception at the American Minister’s,—in short, like most unwarned travellers, they had done about twice as much as prudence and experience would have permitted, had those worthies been consulted.
All the romance of Katy’s nature responded to the fascination of the ancient city,—the capital of the world, as it may truly be called. The shortest drive or walk brought them face to face with innumerable and unexpected delights. Now it was a wonderful fountain, with plunging horses and colossal nymphs and Tritons, holding cups and horns from which showers of white foam rose high in air to fall like rushing rain into an immense marble basin. Now it was an arched doorway with traceries as fine as lace,—sole-remaining fragment of a heathen temple, flung and stranded as it were by the waves of time on the squalid shore of the present. Now it was a shrine at the meeting of three streets, where a dim lamp burned beneath the effigy of the Madonna, with always a fresh rose beside it in a vase, and at its foot a peasant woman kneeling in red bodice and blue petticoat, with a lace-trimmed towel folded over her hair. Or again it would be a sunlit terrace lifted high on a hillside, and crowded with carriages full of beautifully dressed people, while below all Rome seemed spread out like a panorama, dim, mighty, majestic, and bounded by the blue wavy line of the Campagna and the Alban hills. Or perhaps it might be a wonderful double flight of steps with massive balustrades and pillars with urns, on which sat a crowd of figures in strange costumes and attitudes, who all looked as though they had stepped out of pictures, but who were in reality models waiting for artists to come by and engage them. No matter what it was,—a bit of oddly tinted masonry with a tuft of brown and orange wallflowers hanging upon it, or a vegetable stall where endive and chiccory and curly lettuces were arranged in wreaths with tiny orange gourds and scarlet peppers for points of color,—it was all Rome, and, by virtue of that word, different from any other place,—more suggestive, more interesting, ten times more mysterious than any other could possibly be, so Katy thought.
This fact consoled her for everything and anything,—for the fleas, the dirt, for the queer things they had to eat and the still queerer odors they were forced to smell! Nothing seemed of any particular consequence except the deep sense of enjoyment, and the newly discovered world of thought and sensation of which she had become suddenly conscious.
The only drawback to her happiness, as the days went on, was that little Amy did not seem quite well or like herself. She had taken a cold on the journey from Naples, and though it did not seem serious, that, or something, made her look pale and thin. Her mother said she was growing fast, but the explanation did not quite account for the wistful look in the child’s eyes and the tired feeling of which she continually complained. Mrs. Ashe, with vague uneasiness, began to talk of cutting short their Roman stay and getting Amy off to the more bracing air of Florence. But meanwhile there was the Carnival close at hand, which they must by no means lose; and the feeling that their opportunity might be a brief one made her and Katy all the more anxious to make the very most of their time. So they filled the days full with sights to see and things to do, and came and went; sometimes taking Amy with them, but more often leaving her at the hotel under the care of a kind German chambermaid, who spoke pretty good English and to whom Amy had taken a fancy.
“The marble things are so cold, and the old broken things make me so sorry,” she explained; “and I hate beggars because they are dirty, and the stairs make my back ache; and I’d a great deal rather stay with Maria and go up on the roof, if you don’t mind, mamma.”
This roof, which Amy had chosen as a playplace, covered the whole of the great hotel, and had been turned into a sort of upper-air garden by the simple process of gravelling it all over, placing trellises of ivy here and there, and setting tubs of oranges and oleanders and boxes of gay geraniums and stock-gillyflowers on the balustrades. A tame fawn was tethered there. Amy adopted him as a playmate; and what with his company and that of the flowers, the times when her mother and Katy were absent from her passed not unhappily.
Katy always repaired to the roof as soon as they came in from their long mornings and afternoons of sight-seeing. Years afterward, she would remember with contrition how pathetically glad Amy always was to see her. She would put her little head on Katy’s breast and hold her tight for many minutes without saying a word. When she did speak it was always about the house and the garden that she talked. She never asked any questions as to where Katy had been, or what she had done; it seemed to tire her to think about it.
“I should be very lonely sometimes if it were not for my dear little fawn,” she told Katy once. “He is so sweet that I don’t miss you and mamma very much while I have him to play with. I call him Florio,—don’t you think that is a pretty name? I like to stay with him a great deal better than to go about with you to those nasty-smelling old churches, with fleas hopping all over them!”
So Amy was left in peace with her fawn, and the others made haste to see all they could before the time came to go to Florence.
Katy realized one of the “moments” for which she had come to Europe when she stood for the first time