A Call To Arms by Allan Mallinson Page A

happy with Mary, with whom she had become quite intimate. It was certainly not a matter that he and the poet might discuss. ‘You are intent on travelling north for the summer, I hear?’
    Shelley raised his eyebrows a little. ‘It is not settled.’
    ‘Where might you go?’
    ‘Pisa, perhaps. Or Leghorn.’
    ‘But you would leave Rome altogether if you did?’
    ‘I should not keep the rooms, no.’
    ‘We might travel home by way of Leghorn.’
    ‘I wish that you would.’
    They sipped Marsala for a while in silence.
    ‘The duchess is an engaging woman,’ said Hervey at length, almost by way of something to break the silence.
    Shelley smiled. ‘Oh, engaging indeed. You did not know she was a Hervey?’
    ‘There was no reason to. I should be unable even to draw a design of our connection with her line.’
    ‘You thought her handsome, no doubt, too?’
    ‘Handsome indeed!’ replied Hervey readily.
    ‘Perhaps a little old for my taste.’ Shelley smiled again.
    Hervey frowned in mock disapproval.
    ‘My dear friend!’ Shelley’s smile had turned indulgent. ‘I am only too glad to see that your impulses remain that of a man. The duchess has always exercised a powerful attraction.’
    ‘Well, very evidently it was so with the last duke, but—’
    ‘Hervey, she was his mistress for years, and of Lord knows how many other dukes. She has so many children salted about Europe that—’
    ‘Shelley, I really do not think that—’
    ‘And there was always talk of her association with Georgiana, the late duchess.’
    ‘Infamous! Shelley, you would do well not to repeat such things.’
    But Shelley merely smiled the more. ‘Ah, but see what a woman such as she wrought of your demeanour this evening and last.’
    Hervey relented, his smile broadening almost into laughter. ‘There is nothing about him that a good woman would not put right, and more so, even, a bad one!’
    ‘ Vero! Vero! You see, Hervey, what a few months away from that hypocritical land of ours does for the spirits.’
    Hervey nodded, but his smile was now one of some caution. ‘In the short run. But how may we know if it endures?’
    ‘Hervey, you exasperate me with that dogged faith of yours, for that’s what lies at the root of your melancholy. You know, when we walked around St Peter’s together, there was but one inscription that did not excite revulsion in me.’
    ‘Indeed?’ said Hervey, trying to sound surprised that Shelley had found even one.
    ‘Indeed. It was the memento mori above the entrance to the sacristy. But not for the reason it was placed there. Rather because it reminded that our prospects of pleasure are limited.’
    Hervey looked at him intently. ‘And the rest is silence?’
    ‘Yes, Hervey. It is.’
    Hervey sighed, seeming to weigh his words a good deal. ‘Shelley, I might wish it were so.’

CHAPTER FIVE
     
QUO VADIS?
     

    Three days later
     
    Despite the temptations, they stopped only once along the Via Appia before it became wholly a country road. Ruined sepulchres on either side stood regular and imposing, like street-liners for a procession. Here and there a man looking not much better than a vagabond would importune them to stop and descend some dank, dark, subterranean steps to view a catacomb, but the duchess and others had warned Hervey and Peto very emphatically that banditi would fall on them with the utmost savagery if they did, and so Hervey had resolved to come another time, in greater company, to explore these holy vaults. Where they did stop, at Peto’s wish as much as his own, was the tiny church of Domine Quo Vadis. Indeed, so compelling was it, the turning of history in the turning of a single man upon this spot, that to have passed without a prayer, at least, would have seemed to them both a blasphemy. And Commodore Laughton Peto, for all his hardening years aboard men-of-war, stood awed and speechless at the spot for several minutes, half expecting some command or apparition in the