"How beautiful!" he said. "No wonder the English and Americans who come
to Italy for health and the pleasure of art think it a paradise where
every one should be content. And yet...."
"Yes?"
"Under the smile of this God-blessed land there is suffering such as can
hardly be found in any other country of the world. Sometimes I think I
cannot bear it any longer, and must go away, as others do."
"A little more this way, please--thank you! That doesn't do much for
them, does it?"
"For them? No! God comfort the poor exiles--their path is a bridge of
sighs! Poor, friendless, forgotten, huddled together in some dingy
quarter of a foreign city, one a music-master, another a teacher of
languages, a third a supernumerary at a theatre, a fourth an organ-man
or even a beggar in the streets, yet weapons in the hand of God and
shaking the thrones of the world!"
"You have seen something of that, haven't you?"
"I have."
"In London?"
"Yes. There's an old quarter on the fringe of the fashionable district.
It is called Soho. Densely populated, infested with vice, the very sewer
of the city, yet an asylum of liberty for all that. The refugees of
Europe fly to it. Its criminals, too, perhaps; for misery, like poverty,
has many bedfellows."
"You lived there?"
"Yes."
Roma was wiping her fingers with the sponge, and looking sideways out of
the window. "And your old friend, Doctor Roselli--he lived in Soho?"
"In Soho Square when I knew him first. The house faced to the north, and
had a porch and trees in front of it."
The sponge had dropped to the floor, but Roma did not observe it. She
took up a tooth-tool and began to work on the clay again.
"A little more that way, please--thanks! Do you think your friend had a
right to renounce his rank and to break up his family in Italy? Think of
his father--he would be broken-hearted."
"He was--I've heard my old friend say so. He cursed him at last and
forbade him to call himself his son."
"There!"
"But he would never hear a word against the old man. 'He's my
father--that's enough,' he would say."
The tooth-tool, like the sponge, dropped out of Roma's fingers.
"How stupid! But his mother...."
"That was sadder still. In the early years of his exile she would pray
him to come home. 'You are the best of mothers,' he would answer, 'but I
cannot do so.'"