Chapter XI: Piazza Navona

Old Miss Gainsborough was stately and splendid; she made such an effect on me, as she sat enthroned in Bashford’s big frowzy sitting-room, that I had no attention for the kindly struggles of my host in his care for my entertainment. Mr. Bashford, though perhaps suspecting that I was not his sort, wrestled for a while with his manly silence and produced a remark or two; but he was relieved to find that I was happy in watching Miss Gainsborough, and he was more than ready to relax his effort and to let me take my entertainment as I chose. So we watched Miss Gainsborough together--she was sitting at a distance, very upright on an uncomfortable bench, talking to a large untidy female who writhed at her side among the cushions of a low arm-chair. “Ah, Miss Gainsborough, you and I, as old Romans, know better than that!”--the female crooned out the words with an ecstatic lunge towards the bench. “Ah, Lady Mullinger, you and I, as old frumps, had much better hold our tongues!”--and as the answer fell with a rap upon the extended knuckles of the female I recognized my acquaintance of the other day, the day of the pilgrims in the church: Cooksey’s Lady Mullinger, who had tried to arrange that helpful little tea-party for poor Charlotte. She was only for a moment disordered by Miss Gainsborough’s retort; then she collected herself for a good laugh at her friend’s delightful wit.

Miss Gainsborough, handsome, high-coloured, decorated with much magnificence, surveyed Lady Mullinger with a contemptuous eye. “What’s the woman laughing at now?” she demanded--and her ladyship was convulsed anew. They had been talking of some one lately arrived in Rome, to whom they alluded as Lady Vera; and it appeared that Lady Vera in the innocence of her zeal had been shocked by the language of the old Romans, such as Lady Mullinger, when they spoke of matters that to her, Lady Vera, were breathlessly sacred and august. It was the eternal game, you see, to which Cooksey had already introduced me--the game at which you score off the new-comer by your careless natural freedom in the inner ring; but Miss Gainsborough stamped on it summarily--not, I judge, because she had any objection to it herself, but because Lady Mullinger was a fool and needed a smacking. The annoying part of it was that the more she was smacked the louder she cackled. “For the Lord’s sake sit up and behave yourself,” cried Miss Gainsborough; and she called across the room--“Bashford, come and see if you can make her sit quiet and not guffaw like a jackass whenever I open my mouth!” Bashford, rosily perturbed, got up and planted himself before Miss Gainsborough; he seemed to have some idea of protecting Lady Mullinger, but he couldn’t do much for her with the other lady’s daunting eye upon him; he made vague noises of remonstrance and hoped for the best. “Speak up,” said Miss Gainsborough; “be a man, Bashford, and tell her to behave like a reasonable creature!”

Lady Mullinger was indeed deplorable; she writhed, she quaked with obsequious enjoyment; nothing could discourage her ecstasy, not even the fact that her witty friend, addressing herself to Bashford, completely ignored it. Bashford was prudent, but he faced Miss Gainsborough squarely, masking his dread of her with his burly solemnity; she heckled him sharply and shrewdly, not without humour; and Lady Mullinger hung upon the spectacle, industriously applauding unnoticed--except that Bashford now and then, as an honourable and mannerly host, tried to hand her some little share of Miss Gainsborough’s attention to himself. But you can’t help a woman like Lady Mullinger to save her face; she is driven to expose her indignity, do what you will. I take it that in spite of many years of sedulous Romanism she was still beating blindly against the wall of that impregnable fortress of the “old Roman”; and just as she always hoped to entice Father Holt some day to her tea-party, so she couldn’t be reconciled to the sight of Miss Gainsborough chuckling, grandly carousing, digging Mr. Bashford in the ribs with imperious freedom--and turning her straight back upon Lady Mullinger as though she didn’t exist. Poor soul, I thought of her comfortably gossiping with Cooksey the other day--what a pity it seems that she and Cooksey can’t acquiesce in their prime disability and console each other, without breaking themselves upon the fortress. Their disability is of course the fact, never to be lived down, that only an inspiration and a conviction and an enthusiasm brought them to Rome; they weren’t in any way (there are more ways than one) born there.

It seems unfair, but it can’t be helped; Lady Mullinger had better have turned her back (her round and wriggling back) upon Miss Gainsborough and gone off to her pleasant game of tattle with Cooksey. For Miss Gainsborough was as hard as a rock; she was one of the old guard, possessing hereditary rights in Rome that had been bequeathed to her, with the bone of her nose and the slash of her tongue, by I don’t know how many stubborn generations of antiquity in the midland shires. You could note them in the insolence of her eye, in the depth of her riotous chuckle, in the coarse old provinciality of some of her tones. She stood upon the pyramid of her fathers, a last survival--terribly out of date in a world where there are fewer and fewer people to whom we may safely be rude. Miss Gainsborough’s grandmother, perhaps, may have trodden upon the necks of freeborn men and women to her heart’s content; and it must be bitter to her granddaughter to reflect that at _her_ end of time she is reduced to pounding an occasional old goose like Lady Mullinger. Such a triumph is too easy--it is beneath her; and yet I suppose we can hardly expect that Miss Gainsborough, with so much fighting bullying blood in her clear cheek, should hold her hand and soften her tongue when Lady Mullinger comes cringing to meet the attack. As a matter of fact Miss Gainsborough didn’t bother her head about this question, or indeed any other; she inherited her stinging hand and her few tough stalwart opinions, and she gave you either or both in the face if you showed a sign of weakness.

Bashford was horrified, but not weak; he received her rich old banter with a smiling front in silence; and in large silence he still attended when she presently dropped her sportive play and took up some subject of the moment, some dire political portent that she had detected in the newspaper of that morning--over which she was implacable in majestic wrath. It mattered little to _her_, an old woman who would soon be safe with her fathers, rest their souls!--but Bashford, a mere youth, would live to see the fulfilment of her word; and her word, smartly rattling among the tea-cups, was Damnation! Nobody listened to _her_, nobody cared; and the mad infatuation of a crowd of sheep, of swine, of serpents--oh you may laugh, but Miss Gainsborough will call them all the bad names she can think of; and when the crash comes you will remember that _she_ wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Afraid? Well, Miss Gainsborough hadn’t after all a great deal to be afraid of, it occurred to me; she sat pretty comfortably entrenched within her fortress, hurling her defiance at a world which couldn’t touch her; and the shy observer who was watching her from across the room was almost moved to a desperate rejoinder, something to the effect that she hadn’t perhaps considered an argument which the young observer could have expounded with persuasive force, with reason invincible. Shyness saved me, I am glad to think, from the fatuity of offering reason and persuasion to Miss Gainsborough--as though she bothered her head about the why or the wherefore of the opinions that she brandished. They were solid in the hand, they had seen good service and hadn’t failed her; so she laid about her vigorously, like her fathers before her. Lady Mullinger, struck solemn by the thought of the world’s insanity, fervently breathed her assent; and Bashford too was very grave--he feared, so he said, that Miss Gainsborough was only too much in the right of it.

I sat as it chanced by a low window, and a turn of the head gave me a view of half the long length of the Piazza Navona--the old circus or race-course or whatever it was in ancient days. The oblong space with its rounded end--it shows you the line where the Roman chariots traced and raced; for when the games of imperial Rome were over, the track was built about with houses, and now there is a palace on one side, and a church, and three great splashing fountains down the middle; and still the sweep of the track is marked by this open space in the midst of the city, and Bashford’s apartment was like the royal box for the monarch and his minions and his dames. Bashford could hardly sit for the monarch, nor I for the minion; but his dames, one of them at least, might look over the heads of the crowd, surveying the contest, and never be known for an intruder from other lands and times. Miss Gainsborough would have figured admirably upon the scene; and it seemed the waste of a great opportunity that the empress should be here, and the race-course--and yet no crowd, no chariots, only the Piazza Navona sleepily resting and lounging in the hot afternoon. Miss Gainsborough has come too late; the force that she wields has no meaning, no purchase upon the madness of to-day--it has no terror for the Piazza Navona. A few idlers were sprawling out there in the shade, easy-going children of the generation that Miss Gainsborough had chastised and warned; but it was impossible to think that a single knee would tremble if she were to appear at the window and speak her mind. The world couldn’t touch her--but then the world has no will to touch her; these Roman idlers stretch their limbs in the softness of the year, smiling good-naturedly when she orders them to instant execution.

It is too true--her vigour is wasted upon Rome. She may bully Lady Mullinger; but upon Rome at large, the picture of indifference, her ancestral authority produces no impression. She might surely, however, betake herself to a country more capable of understanding her message. At this moment she happened to be lifting her voice against “that rascally feller,” and again, “those good-for-nothing louts”--and the rascal was a puzzle-headed English statesman, and the louts were a large proportion of the English race; and if Miss Gainsborough had their infamy so much at heart it seemed unfortunate that only Bashford and Lady Mullinger should have the benefit of her conviction. “True, true,” said Bashford--“a bad business, I’m afraid”; and “If they could only be _told_!”--Lady Mullinger despairingly sighed. I thought I saw Miss Gainsborough seated upon the pedestal of all that had gone to produce her--acres of English soil, dozens of big stout Warwickshire land-owners, hundreds of other people’s labour and fidelity: an imposing mass, not unworthily crowned by this handsome old image with the bright cheeks and the floriferous bonnet. But what was such a magnificent pile of British solidity doing in Rome, I should like to ask her--in Rome, where its effect was lost in the alien air, and where there was nobody to render it the tribute of admiration, of sacred terror, of fierce exasperation (all three) which it plainly deserved. Her Roman tea-parties could offer Miss Gainsborough no kind of justice. From Lady Mullinger she might indeed receive admiration, and from Bashford terror, and from me my little mite of silent rebellion; but I had to acknowledge that we made an inadequate show, grouped about the base of this remarkable monument. It ought to be set up in London, breasting the big rude crowd of its countrymen--not in Rome, where to the loungers of the Piazza Navona it must be meaningless.

But what far-fetched fancies to be teased with in the presence of Miss Gainsborough--who certainly felt that she had plenty of good sound meaning wherever she was. Perhaps her establishment in Rome was a stately protest against the conduct of the louts and rascals at home; perhaps she preferred the homage of a tea-party to the jostle of a crowd; in any case she did as she chose and owed no account to anybody--least of all to an obscure young observer, hitherto barely noticed, on whom her eye now fell with a command to approach. Miss Gainsborough, I must own, could be very gracious to the young, though she was inclined to despise the shy. Youth pleased her, even awkward and inarticulate youth, and the call of her friendly sarcasm was encouraging. “Come and sit by me, you talkative young man, and don’t let old Platt get near me. Bashford’s expecting old Platt, and he and I always fight like the dooce. I shan’t quarrel with you, because you’re straight from home--Lord, I can tell that! I only get to blows with old monkeys who’ve forgotten _where_ they came from--if they ever came from anywhere. Bashford was born in Rome, poor lamb, but he’s a good lump o’ home stuff for all that--look at him, with his great red face! Ho, Bashford, you’re blushing at my pretty speeches, I’m sure, only it don’t show on your manly bloom. When Platt comes I’m going to elope with this young man; he’ll please to carry me off before I forget that I’m a lady.” She tapped me impressively on the shoulder and bade me be ready to snatch her up the moment she seemed likely to lower herself by violent conduct. Lady Mullinger, who could learn nothing, crowed out on this with a joyous titter; and the moment of my privilege seemed indeed to have arrived--Miss Gainsborough’s fingers twitched and tingled.

But here was old Platt; before we had noticed his entry he was bending over those very fingers, elegantly saluting Miss Gainsborough; and before she had time to forget herself he had skilfully escaped, he was out of her reach; and she sat very stiff and haughty, her head erect, trying to pretend that she hadn’t submitted to his easy liberty with her hand. She had, however--old Platt had been too quick for her; it looked terribly as though Platt, the old monkey, had caught her by surprise and compelled her to be polite to him. It was quite a humiliation for Miss Gainsborough, and I was ashamed to be aware of it. For all her magnificence a man like Platt had the advantage of her, because he was a supple and deft and nimble old wretch, versed in ingratiating arts, while she was accustomed to sit monumentally and to slash at her ease. It is the penalty that is paid by the straight-backed daughter of Warwickshire squires when she leaves her home, exposing herself to the arts and tricks of the foreigner. These outsiders don’t know the rules of the game, or they deliberately flout them with their underhand craft; they won’t see that the rules were laid down by the forefathers of Miss Gainsborough, and that it is not for any impertinent upstart from nowhere to tamper with what he didn’t invent. So Miss Gainsborough fumed in silence; and the devoted Lady Mullinger, pursued to the last by her fatality, thought it a good opportunity to show that she too was of her dear old friend’s opinion--give _her_ she said in emphatic undertones, a _man_, a _real_ man, not an effeminate old thing only fit to dance attendance in a drawing-room. “My good woman,” exclaimed Miss Gainsborough coarsely, “it’s late for _you_ to be asking for a man, real or sham. You and I must take what we can get, at our time o’ life.” Lady Mullinger heaved and cracked with her mirth--“Isn’t she _hard_ on me?” she gasped to the room. But Miss Gainsborough was still discomfited, and she had to remain where she was; she couldn’t now elope to leave old Platt with his advantage.

He was enjoying it very discreetly; nothing could be more graceful than his unconsciousness of Miss Gainsborough’s glare. He hovered about the room with little shrieks of admiration at its dingy adornments, he clasped his hands and fell back in enchantment before a picture, he seized upon Bashford and tenderly slapped him--“My dear boy, _don’t_ look so young and so buxom; it’s thoughtless and cruel of you--there!” Bashford received the dainty slap with all his sturdiness, and Mr. Platt made a pretty little face at him, pouting reproachfully; and then there were more shrieks of delight and a tinkle of laughter, for Mr. Platt had discovered a great row of briar-wood pipes, hanging in a rack on the wall, and he vowed and declared that he had _never_ seen such a darling old John Bull as Mr. Bashford--there, once more! “I ought to have brought a bull-dog and a hunting-crop,” he trilled playfully, “only I shouldn’t know which was which--fancy if I cropped the dog instead of hunting the bull! Now go away and don’t make me laugh, because I’ve got something dreadfully serious to say to Lady Mullinger, who’s a bad bad woman--aren’t you, sweet lady?”--and he skipped to her side, shaking his finger at her, and arranged himself very neatly on a stool at her feet. “Now don’t listen, any of you,” he cried; “it’s a secret--only it isn’t, for it’s the talk of the town; otherwise I’d hush it up, you poor dear thing, for the sake of our past.” He soothed her, patting her hand; and again he knew just how to disengage himself at the right instant, before Lady Mullinger in the surge of her agitation had time to act. He shot a glance of knowing intimacy at Miss Gainsborough in passing, and precisely managed to evade the heart-felt oath that she barked after him as he frisked away.

This elderly sprite had no call to envy the buxom freshness of anybody; he was beautifully pink and buoyant and clear-eyed. Stout he was, but trimly and compactly stout, and his gay little feet twinkled in agile movement. He didn’t remain with us for long; he _had_ to tear himself away, because he was expecting two professors and a doctor of divinity under his own humble roof, and since Lady Mullinger had been untrue to him--“not that I can wonder at _that_, with a dangerous youth like Bashford”--he must trip round and beat up another pretty girl or two for his party; and as for the faithless woman herself, “Oh, my dearest Bash, be very gentle with her--she’s so impulsive”; and with the flutter of a handkerchief, with chirruping cries, with pattering boots, Mr. Platt scattered his leave-taking over the company and was gone. And when he was safely outside, behind the closed door--ah, I should like to have seen him then! Did he pause and turn, did he make an odious and vulgar sign in the direction of the company? I can very well imagine that he did so, and small blame to him. He had brought off a bright and engaging little _scena_ without a hitch, in the teeth of his restive audience; and I can’t believe that he wasn’t deliberately playing with his skill, or that he didn’t smile to himself upon the staircase, tasting the thought of Miss Gainsborough’s expression upon the closing of the door. He knew what he was about.

“Huh!” said Miss Gainsborough--as nearly as I can represent her comment; and she said no more upon that subject, she talked for a few minutes to Bashford upon other matters, and then she made an exceedingly royal departure. Lady Mullinger and I had the appearance of forming a “lane”; Bashford armed her down it and escorted her to the staircase. When he returned Lady Mullinger flounced at him with an outburst of volubility that she was now able to let loose. She wasn’t afraid of old Bashford, and she relapsed into her natural exuberance, as though with the removal of a tightened belt; she fell to work with determination upon the diet that she craved. She abounded upon the topic of Platt--his origin so dubious, his history so mysterious, his connexions so questionable; Lady Mullinger, as one who never listened to scandal, knew nothing _against_ the man, and of course one met him everywhere; but she had been told for a _fact_ that he was involved in that horrid business of--well, you remember it, and how he had suddenly left Rome, so strangely, just before it all came out; and of course it’s no secret that he stays here now because he _daren’t_ go home--yes, Lady Mullinger had had _that_ on the best authority; and nobody hated to be censorious more than she, but in our little friendly Roman circle one must be careful; and after all what _did_ happen exactly in that other affair, the affair of the sacristan and the suppressed pamphlet?--because if Bashford knew, Lady Mullinger felt that she _ought_ to ask him to tell her plainly; and by this time she had quite forgotten that there was a third person present, and on the shock of accidentally meeting my interested gaze she gave a lurch and a plunge, sheering heavily aside into the reflection that for her part she liked to believe the best of everybody, and had always maintained that Mr. Platt was a very good-natured amusing old person. And now she really must fly, with a thousand thanks to dear Mr. Bashford for his charming hospitality.

So she fled--it was a disorderly rout; and with the fall of repose and silence upon the comfortable room I began to follow. But Bashford held me; he was obscurely aware of a burden upon his mind that he wished to throw off. “Give me time,” he seemed to say, detaining me with a firm broad hand. There was plenty of time, and he laboured with his difficulty unhurried. He couldn’t allow a young stranger to carry off the impression that his tea-party hadn’t been quite--hadn’t been exactly--hadn’t been what you might call--; but this line of attack led nowhere, and with the silence still unbroken he cast around for another. Every approach seemed blocked by his loyalty to his guests, but he arrived at last. “A good soul, her ladyship,” said he; and then, drawing a bolder breath--“Tongue runs away with her a bit, at times.” Oh, I quite understood; it may happen to any of us. “It’s my belief,” said Bashford, “that some people _must_ have their talk--keeps ’em alive, if you see what I mean.” He looked up gravely for my effusive assent and found his way now more freely. “That’s what I like about old Martha Gainsborough,” he reflected; “she talks very fierce, but there’s no mischief about her. It’s my belief that some people _will_ make mischief--keeps ’em going, if you see what I mean. Now what I like about old Martha--” The circle of his locution was narrow; he was surprised to find himself at the same point again so soon. He broke away--“There’s plenty of good stuff in old Martha; and that keeps _her_ alive; so she’s no need to pull her friends to pieces.” He frowned approvingly on the phrase, and it started a smile. “Except to their faces,” he added with humour. He had brought me to the door, and he dismissed me warmly. “And mind you,” he called after me, “she’s a very good soul, her ladyship.” I knew who was, anyhow.