After a wild gallop along the crest of a hill she drew up, laughing, to steady her hair, which threatened to come tumbling down about her ears. She dropped the rein loosely on the horse’s neck in order to leave both hands free, and Sybert reached over and took it.
‘See here, young lady,’ he remonstrated, ‘you’re going to take a cropper some day if you ride like that.’
She glanced back with a quick retort on her lips, but his expression disarmed her. He was not watching her with his usual critical look. She changed the words into a laugh.
‘Do you know what you make me feel like doing, Mr. Sybert? Giving Lil the reins and galloping down that hill there with my hands in the air.’
‘Perhaps I would better keep the reins in my own hands,’ was his cool proposition.
‘I never knew any one who could rouse so much latent antagonism in a person as you can! You never say a word but I feel like doing exactly the opposite.’
‘It’s well to know it. I shall frame my future suggestions accordingly.’
Marcia settled her hat and stretched out her hand. He returned the reins with a show of doubt.
‘Can I trust you to restrain your impulses?’ he inquired, with his eyes on the declivity before them.
She gathered up the reins, but made no movement to go on. Instead she half-turned in the saddle and looked behind.
They were on the shoulder of a mountain. Below them smaller foothills receded, tier below tier, until they sank imperceptibly into the level plain of the Campagna. Ahead of them the bare Sabines stretched in broken ridges, backed in the distance by two snow-peaks of the Apennines. Everywhere was the warmth of colouring, the brilliant hues of an Italian spring.
‘Italy is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Marcia asked simply.
‘Yes,’ he agreed; ‘Italy is cursed with beauty.’
She turned her eyes inquiringly from the landscape to him.
‘A nation of artists’ models!’ he exclaimed half contemptuously. ‘Because of their fatal good looks, the Italians can’t be allowed to be prosperous like any other people.’
‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘their beauty is a compensation. They are poor, I know; but don’t you think they know how to be happy in spite of it?’
‘They are too easily happy. That’s another curse.’
‘But you surely don’t want them to be unhappy,’ she remonstrated. ‘Since they have to be poor, shouldn’t you rather see them contented?’
‘Certainly not. They have nothing to be contented with.’
‘But I don’t see that it makes any difference what you are contented with so long as you are contented.’
He looked at her with a half-smile.
‘Nonsense, Miss Marcia; you know better than that. When people are contented with their lot, does their lot ever improve? Do you think the Italian people ought to be happy? You have seen the way they live, or—no,’ he broke off, ‘you don’t know anything about it.’
‘Yes, I do,’ she returned. ‘I know they’re poor—horribly poor—but they seem to get a good deal of pleasure out of life in spite of it.’
He shook his head. ‘You can’t convince me with that argument. Have you never heard of a holy discontent? That’s what these people need—and,’ he added grimly, ‘some of them have got it.’
‘A holy discontent,’ she repeated. ‘What a terrible thing to have! It’s like living for revenge.’
‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged, ‘a man must live for something besides his three meals a day.’
‘He can live for his family,’ she suggested.
‘Yes, if he has one. Otherwise he must live for an idea.’
She glanced at him sidewise. She would have liked to ask what idea he lived for, but it was a question she did not dare to put. Instead she commented: ‘It’s queer, isn’t it, how the ideas that men used to live for have passed away? Chivalry and crusading and going to war and living as hermits—I really don’t see what’s left.’
‘The most of the old ideals are exploded,’ he agreed. ‘But we have new ones to-day—sufficiently bad—to meet the needs of the present century. A man can make a god of his business, for instance.’
Marcia shifted her seat a trifle uneasily as she thought of her father, who certainly did make a god of his business. It may have struck Sybert that it was not a propitious subject, for he added almost instantly—
‘And there’s always art to fall back upon.’
‘But you don’t object to that,’ she remonstrated.
‘No, it’s good enough in its way,’ he agreed; ‘but it doesn’t go very deep.’
‘Artists would tell you then that it isn’t the true art.’
‘I dare say,’ he shrugged; ‘but at best there are a good many truer things.’
‘What, for instance?’
‘Well, three meals a day.’
Marcia laughed, and then she inquired—
‘Suppose you knew a person, Mr. Sybert, who didn’t care for anything but art—who just wanted to have the world beautiful and nothing else, what would you think?’
‘Not much,’ he returned; ‘what would you?’
‘I think that you go a great deal farther in the other extreme!’
‘Not at all,’ he maintained. ‘I am granting that art is a very fine thing; only there are so many more vital issues in life that one doesn’t have time to bother with it much. However, I suppose it’s a phase one has to go through with in Italy. Oh, I’ve been through with it, too,’ he added. ‘I used to feel that Botticelli and Giorgione and the rest of them were really important.’
‘But you got over it?’ she inquired.
‘Yes, I got over it—one does.’
Marcia laughed again. ‘Mr. Sybert,’ she said, ‘I think you are an awfully queer man. You are so sort of unfeeling in some respects and feeling in others.’
‘Miss Marcia, you strike me as an awfully queer young woman for exactly the same reasons.’
They had come to a curve in the road, and under an over-hanging precipice hollowed out of the rock was a little shrine to the Madonna, and beside it a rough iron cross.
‘Some poor devil has met his fate here,’ said Sybert, and he reined in his horse and leaned from his saddle to make out the blurred inscription traced on the bars. ‘Felice Buconi in the year 1840 at this spot received death at the hand of an assassin. Pray for his soul,’ he translated. ‘Poor fellow! It’s a tragedy in Italy to meet one’s death at the hands of an assassin.’
‘Why more in Italy than in any other place?’
‘Because one dies without receiving the sacrament, and has some trouble about getting into heaven.’
‘Oh!’ she returned. ‘I suppose when Gervasio’s father wished that I might die of an apoplexy he was not only damning me for this world, but for the world to come.’
‘Exactly. An apoplexy in Italy is a comprehensive curse.’
‘I think,’ she commented, ‘that I prefer a religion which doesn’t have a purgatory.’
‘Purgatory,’ he returned, ‘has always struck me as quite superior to anything the Protestants offer. It really gives one something to die for.’
‘I should think, for the matter of that, that heaven direct would give one something to die for.’
‘What, for instance? Golden paving-stones, eternal sunshine, and singing angels!’
‘Oh, not necessarily just those things. They’re merely symbolical.’
‘At least,’ said Sybert, ‘perfect peace and beauty and happiness, and nothing beyond. You needn’t tell me, Miss Marcia, that you want to spend an eternity in any such place as that. It might do for a vacation—a villeggiatura—but for ever!’