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What Katy Did Next

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"We will just take a rapid look at a few of the principal things," she
told Katy, "and then get away as fast as we can. Amy is so on my mind
that I have no peace of my life. I keep feeling her pulse and imagining
that she does not look right; and though I know it is all my fancy, I am
impatient to be off. You won't mind, will you, Katy?"

After that everything they did was done in a hurry. Katy felt as if she
were being driven about by a cyclone, as they rushed from one sight to
another, filling up all the chinks between with shopping, which was
irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap.
She herself purchased a tortoise-shell fan and chain for Rose Red, and
had her monogram carved upon it; a coral locket for Elsie; some studs
for Dorry; and for her father a small, beautiful vase of bronze, copied
from one of the Pompeian antiques.

"How charming it is to have money to spend in such a place as this!" she
said to herself with a sigh of satisfaction as she surveyed these
delightful buyings. "I only wish I could get ten times as many things
and take them to ten times as many people. Papa was so wise about it. I
can't think how it is that he always knows beforehand exactly how people
are going to feel, and what they will want!"

Mrs. Ashe also bought a great many things for herself and Amy, and to
take home as presents; and it was all very pleasant and satisfactory
except for that subtle sense of danger from which they could not escape
and which made them glad to go. "See Naples and die," says the old
adage; and the saying has proved sadly true in the case of many an
American traveller.

Beside the talk of fever there was also a good deal of gossip about
brigands going about, as is generally the case in Naples and its
vicinity. Something was said to have happened to a party on one of the
heights above Sorrento; and though nobody knew exactly what the
something was, or was willing to vouch for the story, Mrs. Ashe and
Katy felt a good deal of trepidation as they entered the carriage which
was to take them to the neighborhood where the mysterious "something"
had occurred.

The drive between Castellamare and Sorrento is in reality as safe as
that between Boston and Brookline; but as our party did not know this
fact till afterward, it did them no good. It is also one of the most
beautiful drives in the world, following the windings of the exquisite
coast mile after mile, in long links of perfectly made road, carved on
the face of sharp cliffs, with groves of oranges and lemons and olive
orchards above, and the Bay of Naples beneath, stretching away like a
solid sheet of lapis-lazuli, and gemmed with islands of the most
picturesque form.

It is a pity that so much beauty should have been wasted on Mrs. Ashe
and Katy, but they were too frightened to half enjoy it. Their carriage
was driven by a shaggy young savage, who looked quite wild enough to be
a bandit himself. He cracked his whip loudly as they rolled along, and
every now and then gave a long shrill whistle. Mrs. Ashe was sure that
these were signals to his band, who were lurking somewhere on the
olive-hung hillsides. She thought she detected him once or twice making
signs to certain questionable-looking characters as they passed; and she
fancied that the people they met gazed at them with an air of
commiseration, as upon victims who were being carried to execution. Her
fears affected Katy; so, though they talked and laughed, and made jokes
to amuse Amy, who must not be scared or led to suppose that anything was
amiss, and to the outward view seemed a very merry party, they were
privately quaking in their shoes all the way, and enjoying a deal of
highly superfluous misery. And after all they reached Sorrento in
perfect safety; and the driver, who looked so dangerous, turned out to
be a respectable young man enough, with a wife and family to support,
who considered a plateful of macaroni and a glass of sour red wine as
the height of luxury, and was grateful for a small gratuity of thirty
cents or so, which would enable him to purchase these dainties. Mrs.
Ashe had a very bad headache next day, to pay for her fright; but she
and Katy agreed that they had been very foolish, and resolved to pay no
more attention to unaccredited rumors or allow them to spoil their
enjoyment, which was a sensible resolution to make.

Their hotel was perched directly over the sea. From the balcony of their
sitting-room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high, into
the water; their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange
grove beyond. Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the
little town of Sorrento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the
harbor of the place. Katy was never tired of peering down into this
strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are
hung with vines and trailing growths of all sorts, and seem all
a-tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of
every chink and crevice. She and Amy took walks along the coast toward
Massa, to look off at the lovely island shapes in the bay, and admire
the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the
roadside; and they always came back loaded with orange-flowers, which
could be picked as freely as apple-blossoms from New England orchards in
the spring. The oranges themselves at that time of the year were very
sour, but they answered as well for a romantic date, "From an orange
grove," as if they had been the sweetest in the world.

They made two different excursions to Pompeii, which is within easy
distance of Sorrento. They scrambled on donkeys over the hills, and had
glimpses of the far-away Calabrian shore, of the natural arch, and the
temples of Pæstum shining in the sun many miles distant. On Katy's
birthday, which fell toward the end of January, Mrs. Ashe let her have
her choice of a treat; and she elected to go to the Island of Capri,
which none of them had seen. It turned out a perfect day, with sea and
wind exactly right for the sail, and to allow of getting into the famous
"Blue Grotto," which can only be entered under particular conditions of
tide and weather. And they climbed the great cliff-rise at the island's
end, and saw the ruins of the villa built by the wicked emperor
Tiberius, and the awful place known as his "Leap," down which, it is
said, he made his victims throw themselves; and they lunched at a hotel
which bore his name, and just at sunset pushed off again for the row
home over the charmed sea. This return voyage was almost the pleasantest
thing of all the day. The water was smooth, the moon at its full. It was
larger and more brilliant than American moons are, and seemed to possess
an actual warmth and color. The boatmen timed their oar-strokes to the
cadence of Neapolitan _barcaroles_ and folk-songs, full of rhythmic
movement, which seemed caught from the pulsing tides. And when at last
the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing-place, Katy drew a
long, regretful breath, and declared that this was her best
birthday-gift of all, better than Amy's flowers, or the pretty
tortoise-shell locket that Mrs. Ashe had given her, better even than the
letter from home, which, timed by happy accident, had arrived by the
morning's post to make a bright opening for the day.

All pleasant things must come to an ending.

"Katy," said Mrs. Ashe, one afternoon in early February, "I heard some
ladies talking just now in the _salon_, and they said that Rome is
filling up very fast. The Carnival begins in less than two weeks, and
everybody wants to be there then. If we don't make haste, we shall not
be able to get any rooms."

"Oh dear!" said Katy, "it is very trying not to be able to be in two
places at once. I want to see Rome dreadfully, and yet I cannot bear to
leave Sorrento. We have been very happy here, haven't we?"

So they took up their wandering staves again, and departed for Rome,
like the Apostle, "not knowing what should befall them there."




CHAPTER IX.

A ROMAN HOLIDAY.


"Oh dear!" said Mrs. Ashe, as she folded her letters and laid them
aside, "I wish those Pages would go away from Nice, or else that the
frigates were not there."

"Why! what's the matter?" asked Katy, looking up from the many-leaved
journal from Clover over which she was poring.

"Nothing is the matter except that those everlasting people haven't gone
to Spain yet, as they said they would, and Ned seems to keep on seeing
them," replied Mrs. Ashe, petulantly.

"But, dear Polly, what difference does it make? And they never did
promise you to go on any particular time, did they?"

"N-o, they didn't; but I wish they would, all the same. Not that Ned is
such a goose as really to care anything for that foolish Lilly!" Then
she gave a little laugh at her own inconsistency, and added, "But I
oughtn't to abuse her when she is your cousin."

"Don't mention it," said Katy, cheerfully. "But, really, I don't see why
poor Lilly need worry you so, Polly dear."

The room in which this conversation took place was on the very topmost
floor of the Hotel del Hondo in Rome. It was large and many-windowed;
and though there was a little bed in one corner half hidden behind a
calico screen, with a bureau and washing-stand, and a sort of stout
mahogany hat-tree on which Katy's dresses and jackets were hanging, the
remaining space, with a sofa and easy-chairs grouped round a fire, and a
round table furnished with books and a lamp, was ample enough to make a
good substitute for the private sitting-room which Mrs. Ashe had not
been able to procure on account of the near approach of the Carnival and
the consequent crowding of strangers to Rome. In fact, she was assured
that under the circumstances she was lucky in finding rooms as good as
these; and she made the most of the assurance as a consolation for the
somewhat unsatisfactory food and service of the hotel, and the four long
flights of stairs which must be passed every time they needed to reach
the dining-room or the street door.

The party had been in Rome only four days, but already they had seen a
host of interesting things. They had stood in the strange sunken space
with its marble floor and broken columns, which is all that is left of
the great Roman Forum. They had visited the Coliseum, at that period
still overhung with ivy garlands and trailing greeneries, and not, as
now, scraped clean and bare and "tidied" out of much of its
picturesqueness. They had seen the Baths of Caracalla and the Temple of
Janus and St. Peter's and the Vatican marbles, and had driven out on the
Campagna and to the Pamphili-Doria Villa to gather purple and red
anemones, and to the English cemetery to see the grave of Keats. They
had also peeped into certain shops, and attended a reception at the
American Minister's,--in short, like most unwarned travellers, they had
done about twice as much as prudence and experience would have
permitted, had those worthies been consulted.

All the romance of Katy's nature responded to the fascination of the
ancient city,--the capital of the world, as it may truly be called. The
shortest drive or walk brought them face to face with innumerable and
unexpected delights. Now it was a wonderful fountain, with plunging
horses and colossal nymphs and Tritons, holding cups and horns from
which showers of white foam rose high in air to fall like rushing rain
into an immense marble basin. Now it was an arched doorway with
traceries as fine as lace,--sole-remaining fragment of a heathen temple,
flung and stranded as it were by the waves of time on the squalid shore
of the present. Now it was a shrine at the meeting of three streets,
where a dim lamp burned beneath the effigy of the Madonna, with always a
fresh rose beside it in a vase, and at its foot a peasant woman kneeling
in red bodice and blue petticoat, with a lace-trimmed towel folded over
her hair. Or again it would be a sunlit terrace lifted high on a
hillside, and crowded with carriages full of beautifully dressed people,
while below all Rome seemed spread out like a panorama, dim, mighty,
majestic, and bounded by the blue wavy line of the Campagna and the
Alban hills. Or perhaps it might be a wonderful double flight of steps
with massive balustrades and pillars with urns, on which sat a crowd of
figures in strange costumes and attitudes, who all looked as though they
had stepped out of pictures, but who were in reality models waiting for
artists to come by and engage them. No matter what it was,--a bit of
oddly tinted masonry with a tuft of brown and orange wallflowers hanging
upon it, or a vegetable stall where endive and chiccory and curly
lettuces were arranged in wreaths with tiny orange gourds and scarlet
peppers for points of color,--it was all Rome, and, by virtue of that
word, different from any other place,--more suggestive, more
interesting, ten times more mysterious than any other could possibly be,
so Katy thought.

This fact consoled her for everything and anything,--for the fleas, the
dirt, for the queer things they had to eat and the still queerer odors
they were forced to smell! Nothing seemed of any particular consequence
except the deep sense of enjoyment, and the newly discovered world of
thought and sensation of which she had become suddenly conscious.

The only drawback to her happiness, as the days went on, was that
little Amy did not seem quite well or like herself. She had taken a
cold on the journey from Naples, and though it did not seem serious,
that, or something, made her look pale and thin. Her mother said she
was growing fast, but the explanation did not quite account for the
wistful look in the child's eyes and the tired feeling of which she
continually complained. Mrs. Ashe, with vague uneasiness, began to talk
of cutting short their Roman stay and getting Amy off to the more
bracing air of Florence. But meanwhile there was the Carnival close at
hand, which they must by no means lose; and the feeling that their
opportunity might be a brief one made her and Katy all the more anxious
to make the very most of their time. So they filled the days full with
sights to see and things to do, and came and went; sometimes taking Amy
with them, but more often leaving her at the hotel under the care of a
kind German chambermaid, who spoke pretty good English and to whom Amy
had taken a fancy.

"The marble things are so cold, and the old broken things make me so
sorry," she explained; "and I hate beggars because they are dirty, and
the stairs make my back ache; and I'd a great deal rather stay with
Maria and go up on the roof, if you don't mind, mamma."

This roof, which Amy had chosen as a playplace, covered the whole of the
great hotel, and had been turned into a sort of upper-air garden by the
simple process of gravelling it all over, placing trellises of ivy here
and there, and setting tubs of oranges and oleanders and boxes of gay
geraniums and stock-gillyflowers on the balustrades. A tame fawn was
tethered there. Amy adopted him as a playmate; and what with his company
and that of the flowers, the times when her mother and Katy were absent
from her passed not unhappily.

Katy always repaired to the roof as soon as they came in from their long
mornings and afternoons of sight-seeing. Years afterward, she would
remember with contrition how pathetically glad Amy always was to see
her. She would put her little head on Katy's breast and hold her tight
for many minutes without saying a word. When she did speak it was always
about the house and the garden that she talked. She never asked any
questions as to where Katy had been, or what she had done; it seemed to
tire her to think about it.

"I should be very lonely sometimes if it were not for my dear little
fawn," she told Katy once. "He is so sweet that I don't miss you and
mamma very much while I have him to play with. I call him Florio,--don't
you think that is a pretty name? I like to stay with him a great deal
better than to go about with you to those nasty-smelling old churches,
with fleas hopping all over them!"

So Amy was left in peace with her fawn, and the others made haste to see
all they could before the time came to go to Florence.

[Illustration: Amy was left in peace with her fawn.]

Katy realized one of the "moments" for which she had come to Europe when
she stood for the first time on the balcony overhanging the Corso, which
Mrs. Ashe had hired in company with some acquaintances made at the
hotel, and looked down at the ebb and surge of the just-begun Carnival.
The narrow street seemed humming with people of all sorts and
conditions. Some were masked; some were not. There were ladies and
gentlemen in fashionable clothes, peasants in the gayest costumes,
surprised-looking tourists in tall hats and linen dusters, harlequins,
clowns, devils, nuns, dominoes of every color,--red, white, blue, black;
while above, the balconies bloomed like a rose-garden with pretty faces
framed in lace veils or picturesque hats. Flowers were everywhere,
wreathed along the house-fronts, tied to the horses' ears, in ladies'
hands and gentlemen's button-holes, while venders went up and down the
street bearing great trays of violets and carnations and camellias for
sale. The air was full of cries and laughter, and the shrill calls of
merchants advertising their wares,--candy, fruit, birds, lanterns, and
_confetti_, the latter being merely lumps of lime, large or small, with
a pea or a bean embedded in each lump to give it weight. Boxes full of
this unpleasant confection were suspended in front of each balcony, with
tin scoops to use in ladling it out and flinging it about. Everybody
wore or carried a wire mask as protection against this white, incessant
shower; and before long the air became full of a fine dust which hung
above the Corso like a mist, and filled the eyes and noses and clothes
of all present with irritating particles.

Pasquino's Car was passing underneath just as Katy and Mrs. Ashe
arrived,--a gorgeous affair, hung with silken draperies, and bearing as
symbol an enormous egg, in which the Carnival was supposed to be in act
of incubation. A huge wagon followed in its wake, on which was a house
some sixteen feet square, whose sole occupant was a gentleman attended
by five servants, who kept him supplied with _confetti_, which he
showered liberally on the heads of the crowd. Then came a car in the
shape of a steamboat, with a smoke-pipe and sails, over which flew the
Union Jack, and which was manned with a party wearing the dress of
British tars. The next wagon bore a company of jolly maskers equipped
with many-colored bladders, which they banged and rattled as they went
along. Following this was a troupe of beautiful circus horses,
cream-colored with scarlet trappings, or sorrel with blue, ridden by
ladies in pale green velvet laced with silver, or blue velvet and gold.
Another car bore a bird-cage which was an exact imitation of St.
Peter's, within which perched a lonely old parrot. This device evidently
had a political signification, for it was alternately hissed and
applauded as it went along. The whole scene was like a brilliant,
rapidly shifting dream; and Katy, as she stood with lips apart and eyes
wide open with wonderment and pleasure, forgot whether she was in the
body or not,--forgot everything except what was passing before her gaze.

She was roused by a stinging shower of lime-dust. An Englishman in the
next balcony had take courteous advantage of her preoccupation, and had
flung a scoopful of _confetti_ in her undefended face! It is generally
Anglo-Saxons of the less refined class, English or Americans, who do
these things at Carnival times. The national love of a rough joke comes
to the surface, encouraged by the license of the moment, and all the
grace and prettiness of the festival vanish. Katy laughed, and dusted
herself as well as she could, and took refuge behind her mask; while a
nimble American boy of the party changed places with her, and
thenceforward made that particular Englishman his special target, plying
such a lively and adroit shovel as to make Katy's assailant rue the hour
when he evoked this national reprisal. His powdered head and rather
clumsy efforts to retaliate excited shouts of laughter from the
adjoining balconies. The young American, fresh from tennis and college
athletics, darted about and dodged with an agility impossible to his
heavily built foe; and each effective shot and parry on his side was
greeted with little cries of applause and the clapping of hands on the
part of those who were watching the contest.

Exactly opposite them was a balcony hung with white silk, in which sat a
lady who seemed to be of some distinction; for every now and then an
officer in brilliant uniform, or some official covered with orders and
stars, would be shown in by her servants, bow before her with the utmost
deference, and after a little conversation retire, kissing her gloved
hand as he went. The lady was a beautiful person, with lustrous black
eyes and dark hair, over which a lace mantilla was fastened with diamond
stars. She wore pale blue with white flowers, and altogether, as Katy
afterward wrote to Clover, reminded her exactly of one of those
beautiful princesses whom they used to play about in their childhood and
quarrel over, because every one of them wanted to be the Princess and
nobody else.

"I wonder who she is," said Mrs. Ashe in a low tone. "She might be
almost anybody from her looks. She keeps glancing across to us, Katy. Do
you know, I think she has taken a fancy to you."

Perhaps the lady had; for just then she turned her head and said a word
to one of her footmen, who immediately placed something in her hand. It
was a little shining bonbonniere, and rising she threw it straight at
Katy. Alas! it struck the edge of the balcony and fell into the street
below, where it was picked up by a ragged little peasant girl in a red
jacket, who raised a pair of astonished eyes to the heavens, as if sure
that the gift must have fallen straight from thence. Katy bent forward
to watch its fate, and went through a little pantomime of regret and
despair for the benefit of the opposite lady, who only laughed, and
taking another from her servant flung with better aim, so that it fell
exactly at Katy's feet. This was a gilded box in the shape of a
mandolin, with sugar-plums tucked cunningly away inside. Katy kissed
both her hands in acknowledgment for the pretty toy, and tossed back a
bunch of roses which she happened to be wearing in her dress. After that
it seemed the chief amusement of the fair unknown to throw bonbons at
Katy. Some went straight and some did not; but before the afternoon
ended, Katy had quite a lapful of confections and trifles,--roses,
sugared almonds, a satin casket, a silvered box in the shape of a
horseshoe, a tiny cage with orange blossoms for birds on the perches, a
minute gondola with a _marron glacée_ by way of passenger, and,
prettiest of all, a little ivory harp strung with enamelled violets
instead of wires. For all these favors she had nothing better to offer,
in return, than a few long-tailed bonbons with gay streamers of ribbon.
These the lady opposite caught very cleverly, rarely missing one, and
kissing her hand in thanks each time.

"Isn't she exquisite?" demanded Katy, her eyes shining with
excitement. "Did you ever see any one so lovely in your life, Polly
dear? I never did. There, now! she is buying those birds to set them
free, I do believe."

It was indeed so. A vender of larks had, by the aid of a long staff,
thrust a cage full of wretched little prisoners up into the balcony; and
"Katy's lady," as Mrs. Ashe called her, was paying for the whole. As
they watched she opened the cage door, and with the sweetest look on her
face encouraged the birds to fly away. The poor little creatures cowered
and hesitated, not knowing at first what use to make of their new
liberty; but at last one, the boldest of the company, hopped to the door
and with a glad, exultant chirp flew straight upward. Then the others,
taking courage from his example, followed, and all were lost to view in
the twinkling of an eye.

"Oh, you angel!" cried Katy, leaning over the edge of the balcony and
kissing both hands impulsively, "I never saw any one so sweet as you are
in my life. Polly dear, I think carnivals are the most perfectly
bewitching things in the world. How glad I am that this lasts a week,
and that we can come every day. Won't Amy be delighted with these
bonbons! I do hope my lady will be here tomorrow."

How little she dreamed that she was never to enter that balcony again!
How little can any of us see what lies before us till it comes so near
that we cannot help seeing it, or shut our eyes, or turn away!

The next morning, almost as soon as it was light, Mrs. Ashe tapped at
Katy's door. She was in her dressing-gown, and her eyes looked large and
frightened.

"Amy is ill," she cried. "She has been hot and feverish all night, and
she says that her head aches dreadfully. What shall I do, Katy? We
ought to have a doctor at once, and I don't know the name even of any
doctor here."

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