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CHAPTER III.

I WAITED for some passionate outbreak from her after the manner of women; but none came: one might have said she had been frozen there, so silently she stood.

After a little while she turned her face to me.

So one would fancy any creature would look that finds itself, adrift upon a wide and unknown sea, and has been dreaming of land and home, and wakes and finds only the salt water and the unfamiliar stars.

I tried to comfort her, blunderingly; a man so often does his worst when he means the best.

"Take courage, my dear," I said, " and do not look like that. They are all that are left, it is true, those columns in the wall; and that arch, and a few lintels and capitals and such like, here and there, like this egg-and-cup cornice just above our heads where that woman crimps her fish; and where the Venus and the Love are gone, who knows? The losses of the world are many; they may be under our very feet beneath the soil; that is quite possible. And the place is filthy and the people are cruel, and you may well be startled. But do not think that it is all as bad as this. Oh, no: Rome is still beautiful: so you will say when you know it well; and the past is all about you in it; only you must have patience. It is like an intaglio that has been lying, in the sand for a score of centuries. You must rub the dust away; then the fine and noble lines of the classic face show clearly still. You thought to see Augustan Rome? I know! And your heart aches because of the squalor and the decay and the endless loss everywhere that never will be made up to the world, let the ages come and go as they may, and cities rise and fall. But you must have patience. Rome will not give her secrets up at the first glance. Only wait a little while and see the moon shine on it all a night or two, and you will learn to love her better in her colossal ruin than even you have loved the marble and ivory city of your dreams. For | | 32 there is nothing mean or narrow here: the vaults, the domes, the stairs, the courts, the waters, the hills, the plains, the sculpture, the very light itself, they are all wide and vast and noble, and man himself dilates in them, gains stature and soul as it were, one scarce knows how, and someway looks nearer God in Rome than ever he looks elsewhere. But I talk foolishly; and this is the Ghetto."

I had hardly known very well what I did say: I wanted to solace her, and knew ill how to do it. She stood with wide-opened despairing eyes, looking down the narrow lines of stinking Pescheria to the charred and crumbled columns built into the church-wall of Our Lady of the Fishes. She had not heard a single word that I had said.

"This is Rome!" she murmured, after a moment, and was still again: her voice had changed strangely, and all the hope was dead in it,--the hope that a little while before had rung as sweet and clear as rings the linnet's song at daybreak in the priory garden upon Aventine.

"This is the Hebrew quarter of Rome,--yes," I answered her. It seemed to me as if I said, "Yes, this is hell," and led her there. She went forward without any other word, and entered the Place of Weeping.

"Is there one Ben Sulim here,--an old man?" she asked of a youth beating a worn Persian carpet, red and white, upon the stones. The lad nodded, tossing his dusky curls out of his jewel-bright eyes to stare at her.

"You want him?" he said. "Go to the left, there--on the fifth floor just underneath the roof; there, where that bit of gold brocade is hanging out to scare the moths away with the sun. Do you bring any good things to sell? or come to buy?"

"Is he poor?" she asked, dreamily, watching the olive-skinned babies that were rolling in the dirt. The lad grinned from end to end of his mouth, like a tulip-flower.

"We are all poor here," he answered her, and fell again to the thrashing of his carpet, while the babies rolled in the dust with curious delight in its filth and their own nakedness. She moved on towards the place that he had pointed out, where the brocade that might one day have served Vittoria Colonna was catching on its tarnished gold such narrow glints of sunshine as could come between the close-packed roofs. She seemed to have forgotten me.

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I caught her skirts and tried to hold her back. "Stay, my dear, stay!" I said to her, not knowing very well what words I used. "Let me go first and ask: this is no place for you. Stay; see, I am poor too, and old, and of little account, but my home is better than this reeking desolation, and this stew of thieves and usurers and necromancers, and foul women who blend vile philtres to the hurt of maidens' souls. Come, you who belong to all the gods of Joy, you must not be buried there; you, my Ariadne, you will grow sick and blind with sorrow, and die like a caged nightingale of never seeing any glimpse of heaven, and how will Love, who loves you, ever find you there? Come back----"

She looked at me wonderingly, thinking me mad, no doubt, for what could she know of my dream before the Borghese bronze? But the pain in her was too deep for any lesser emotion to prevail much with her. She drew herself from my grasp, and moved onward towards the deep dark doorway like a pit's mouth that was underneath the gold brocade.

Two hags were sitting at the door-step, fat and yellow, picking over rags, rubies of glass and chains of gilt beads shaking in their ears and on their breasts. They leered upon her as she approached.

She turned and stretched her hand to me.

"You have been good, and I am thankful," she said, faintly. "But let me go alone. The old man is poor, that is a reason the more; perhaps he wants me. Let me go. If I have need of anything I will cone to you by yon fountain. Let me go."

Then the mouth of the pit seemed to swallow her, the darkness seemed to engulf her, and the red glow of the dying poppies in her hand was lost to me.

The two hags, who had been all eyes and ears, chuckled, and nodded at me.

"A fair morsel that! Does she go to Ben Eddin? She has a look of Zourah. Oh, yes, she has a look of Zourah. It is only the other day,--some sixteen years or so,--the handsomest maid in all the Ghetto, and with a voice!--like a rain of diamonds the notes were when she sang. She used to sing on high there, where the gold stuff hangs, and all the courts were still as death to listen. Ben Sulim had just sold her to a man of Milan for the public stage, when one morn the bird was missing, and he searched all Rome in vain: some said she | | 34 had gone with a student, a Trasteverino, who worked in marble, who had been banished for some irreverence to his own church, the church of the Christians. But no one ever rightly knew. Is this her daughter?--a comely maiden. But she will get no welcome there. Well, there are princes and cardinals!----"

And with a leer again, and laughter in their thick quaking voices, they turned to their old rags. I sought to get from them what manner of man this Syrian Jew was who dwelt there; but they were cautious, or else tongue-tied by the comradeship of a common faith with him. They would tell me nothing more, except that he was poor, and had come to Rome many long years before from Smyrna.

I left them with a shudder and took my homeward way.

There were the butcher's boots waiting, and Padre Trillo's shoes to go to him, and that fragment from the Aldine press to pore over, and many things to interest me, such as, the gods be praised! I always found in life; such as any one may find indeed if they will seek for them.

If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning his fate in his despair and sickening of his narrow home, had tried to see how many fair strange things there lay at his house-door, had tried to care for the troubles of the men that hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent woes of the girl that carried the grass to the cow, and the obscure martyrdom of maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone through who sat spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found that his little borgo that he hated so for its dullness had all the comedies and tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder is it for the unutterable waste, the unending pain, of life. But he would never have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed, the stories and the poems that were round him in the millet-fields and the olive-orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand, and which will burn through the darkest night and make the light of a home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that breathes.

My heart was heavy as I left the Place of Weeping and passed into the crooked spot where the schools gather and the Hebrew children learn the lex talionis as a virtue: just there, there hangs, as all the world knows, a dusky, vast, irregular | | 35 mass of stone and rubble that frowns on the streets beneath like a leaden storm-hued cloud.

So black it looked and hateful, frowning against the blue sky of the sweet afternoon, that for a moment I forgot what it was,--one moment only: then I knew the shapeless mound was once the theatre of Balbus; the mass built on to it and out of it was the palace of the Cenci.

On high are the grated casements whence the eyes of Beatrice once looked to see if there were any light on earth or hope in heaven, since she had been born in hell and in hell must perish.

Behind, fathoms deep, as in sea-depths, lie the shameful and secret caverns where imperial crimes were done, and death-cries stifled, and dead bodies dragged out by the hook to the river, and nameless infamies wrought on hapless innocence that never vengeance reached nor any judgment followed.

Those two hang together over the Ghetto, the sin of the Empire, the horror of the Cenci: in their shadow I left her.