Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/656

636 even a famous shrine, a memoria, where pilgrims and hermits flocked and full confession of guilt was wrung from the most obdurate criminals. Even the church was a damp and dilapidated edifice, with a wax statue of the Virgin for sole ornament, and no store of tapestries, stuffs of damask, and golden tissue wherewith to drape door and column on high festivals. Cesare Tormmasi's mature bride estimated shrines and people according to the amount of success and reputation they enjoyed in a time-serving world.

As Pia had crept towards the sanctuary, she had passed Masolino, lounging outside the Black Eagle, while his mother peered over his shoulder.

"Ah, it is a good sign to meet a dwarf the first person in the day," remarked Marianna Cari. "We may have a traveller before nightfall, and they are rare enough! Guido has gone to his work again, the saints be praised!"

Pursuing her way, Pia had laid the taper before the image, murmuring quite low,—

"You have not treated me well, Holy Mother, to deceive me like that yesterday: still, I do not wish to break with you wholly, Sanctissima."

Then she had climbed to the tower, tempted by the open door of the sacristy to peep down on the Villa Margherita, and found Guido crouching beside the casement. She was not surprised. She was seldom surprised. She possessed the philosophical cynicism which, in her people, is as old at the classical land they inhabit.

As for Guido, he speedily resumed his former posture of watching the silent house and garden. Pia would understand his unusual conduct without any explanation on his part. Pia was an echo of responsive sympathy. The generous soul in the quaint and twisted body of this little, wise woman was the chalice into which he had ever poured the gushing stream of his own aspirations. When he complained, railing at the chain of poverty which bound him to the quarries, she listened. When his mood was morose, gloomy, dispirited, she spoke, a pygmy in stature, yet capable of carrying his thoughts on the ardent wings of hope to the infinite and immeasurable glory of achievement.

Pia knew that since earliest boyhood Guido had employed all spare hours designing in clay or stucco, a practice which imparts great facility in modelling. From fashioning leaves, garlands, capitals, and heads of animals to the bust of Cesare Tommasi, progress had been simply natural development. The young man had often copied the works of the Carrara museum, arid the basso-rilievi of the studio walls, without method or instruction other than the intuitive perception of a quick eye and accurate judgment.

Niccolò Pisano once mused thus over the story of Hippolytus and Phædra, carved on the sarcophagus of the Pisan Campo Santo, containing the dust of Beatrice, mother of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany.

Pia was also aware that Carrara, like Genoa, with all the wealth of material at hand, has been sterile in art, save for the two sculptors Alberto Maffiolo dei Maffioli and Danese Cattaneo. Balm of Gilead in a dreary life! Pia believed in the genius of Guido.