The Eternal City
Page 71"With pleasure, Princess."
"That's charming! After the opera we'll have supper at the Grand Hotel.
Good-day!" said the Princess, and then in a low voice at the door, "I
leave you to your delightful duties, my dear. You are not looking so
well, though. Must be the scirocco. My poor dear husband used to suffer
from it shockingly. Adieu!"
Roma was less confused but just as nervous when she settled to her work
afresh.
"I've been thinking all night long of the story you told me yesterday,"
she said. "No, that way, please--eyes as before--thank you! About your
old friend, I mean. He was a good man--I don't doubt that--but he made
anybody a right to sacrifice his flesh and blood to a work for the
world?"
"When a man has taken up a mission for humanity his kindred must
reconcile themselves to that," said Rossi.
"Yes, but a child, one who cannot be consulted. Your friend's daughter,
for example. She was to lose everything--her father himself at last. How
could he love her? I suppose you would say he did love her."
"Love her? He lived for her. She was everything on earth to him, except
the one thing to which he had dedicated his life."
A half-smile parted her lovely lips.
his jewels but one, and the love of father, mother, and wife seemed to
gather itself up in the child."
The lovely lips had a doubtful curve.
"How bright she was, too! I can see her still in the dingy London house
with her violet eyes and coal-black hair and happy ways--a gleam of the
sun from our sunny Italy."
She looked at him. His face was calm and solemn. Did he really know her
after all? She felt her cheeks flush and tingle.
"And yet he left her behind to come to Italy on a hopeless errand," she
said.
"How could he know what would happen?"
"He couldn't, and that troubled him most of all. He lived in constant
fear of being taken away from his daughter before her little mind was
stamped with the sense of how much he loved her. Delicious selfishness!
Yet it was not altogether selfish. The world was uncharitable and cruel,
and in the rough chance of life it might even happen that she would be
led to believe that because her father gave her away, and left her, he
did not love her."