Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/349

 is superposed on the white wall before the last one has quite faded. It represented Mary Garland standing there with eyes in which the horror seemed slowly, slowly to expire, and hanging motionless hands which at last made no resistance when his own offered to take them. When of old a man was burnt at the stake it was cruel to have to be present; but, one's presence assumed, it was charity to lend a hand, to pile up the fuel and make the flames do their work quickly and the smoke muffle up the victim. And it did n't diminish the charity that this was perhaps an obligation especially felt if one had a reversionary interest in something the victim was to leave behind.

One morning in the midst of all this Rowland walked heedlessly out of a florid city gate and found himself on the road to Fiesole. It was a day all benignant; the March sun felt like May, as the English poet of Florence says; the thick-blossomed shrubs, the high-climbing plants that hung over the walls of villa and podere flung their odorous promise into the warm still air. He followed, our friend, the winding, mounting lanes; lingered as he got higher beneath the rusty cypresses, beside the low parapets, where you look down on the charming city and sweep the vale of the Arno; reached the small square before the cathedral and rested a while in the massive, dusky church; then, climbing higher, pushed up to the Franciscan convent poised on the very apex of the great hill. He rang at the little gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him, a personage almost maudlin with the milk of human kindness. 315