Babylon. Volume 3

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Allen Grant. Babylon. Volume 3

CHAPTER XXIX. A VIEW OF ROME, By Hiram Winthrop

CHAPTER XXX. MINNA’S RESOLUTION

CHAPTER XXXI. COUSINS

CHAPTER XXXII. RE-ENTER GWEN

CHAPTER XXXIII. CECCA

CHAPTER XXXIV. HIRAM SEES LAND

CHAPTER XXXV. MAN PROPOSES

CHAPTER XXXVI. CECCA SHOWS HER HAND

CHAPTER XXXVII. CECCA AND MINNA

CHAPTER XXXVIII. GWEN HAS A VISITOR

CHAPTER XXXIX. GWEN’S DECISION

CHAPTER XL. AFTER THE STORM

CHAPTER XLI. AUDOUIN’S MISTAKE

CHAPTER XLII. A DISTINGUISHED CRITIC

CHAPTER XLIII. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

CHAPTER XLIV. THE CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

CHAPTER XLV. HOVERING

CHAPTER XLVI. AUDOUIN SINKS OR SWIMS

CHAPTER XLVII. ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

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As Minna Wroe opened her eyes that morning in the furnished house in the Via Clementina, she could hardly realise even now that she was actually at Rome, and within half-an-hour’s walk of dear Colin.

Yes, that was mainly how the Eternal City, the capital of art, the centre of Christendom, the great museum of all the ages, envisaged itself as of course to the frank barbarism of poor wee Minna’s simple little bosom. Some of us, when we go to Rome, see in it chiefly a vast historical memory – the Forum, the Colosseum, the arch of Titus, the ruined Thermæ, the Palace of the Caesars. Some of us see in it rather a magnificent panorama of ancient and modern art, the Vatican, St. Peter’s, the Apollo, the Aphrodite, the great works of Michael Angelo, and Raphael, and the spacious broad-souled Renaissance painters. Some see in it a modern gimcrack Italian metropolis; some, a fashionable English winter residence; some, a picturesque, quaint old-world mediæval city; some, a Babylon doomed before long to a terrible fiery destruction; and some, a spiritual centre of marvellous activity, with branches that ramify out in a thousand directions over the entire civilised and barbarous world. But Minna Wroe thought of that wonderful composite heterogeneous Rome for the most part merely as the present home and actual arena of Colin Churchill, sculptor, at Number 84 in the Via Colonna.

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It was the exact Italian beauty of her long-nursed girlish terrors! A queenly dark woman, with supple statuesque figure and splendidly set head, was standing before the two young artists in an attitude half studied pose, half natural Calabrian peasant gracefulness. Her brown neck and arms were quite bare; her large limbs were scarcely concealed below by a short and clinging sculpturesque kirtle. She was looking towards Colin with big languishing eyes, and her smile – for she was smiling – had something in it of that sinister air that northerners often notice among even the most beautiful women of the Mediterranean races. It was plain that she couldn’t understand what her two admirers were saying in their foreign language; but it was plain also that she knew they were praising her extraordinary beauty, and her eyes flashed forth accordingly with evident pride and overflowing self-satisfaction. Cecca was beautiful, clearly beautiful, both in face and figure, with a rich, mature southern beauty (though in years perhaps she was scarcely twenty), and Minna was forced in spite of herself to admire her form; but she felt instinctively there was something about the girl that she would have feared and dreaded, even if she hadn’t heard Colin Churchill speaking of her with such unstinted and unhesitating admiration. So this was Cecca! So this was Cecca! And so this was the end, too, of all her long romantic day-dream!

As she stood there, partly doubting whether to run away or not, Cecca caught sight of her half hidden behind the Apollo, and turning to Colin, cried out sharply in a cold, ringing, musical voice as clear and as cold as crystal, ‘See, see; a signorina! She waits to speak with you.’

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