"The church at Limburg shows a mixture of the round Romanesque and the pointed Gothic; Gothic was preparing; that sort of thing belongs to the first half of the thirteenth century. Well, that bespeaks very good taste. What next would you mention, Miss Dolly?"
"I don't know; I have enjoyed so many things. Perhaps I should say the Doge's palace at Venice."
"Ha! the Doge's palace, hey? You like the pink and white marble."
"Don't you, Mr. Thayer?"
"That's not what one looks for in architecture. What do you say to St.
Peter's?"
"You will find a great deal of fault with me. I did not care for it."
"Not? It is Michael Angelo's work."
"But knowing the artist is no reason for admiring the work," said Dolly, smiling.
"You are very independent! St. Peter's! Not to admire St. Peter's!"
"I admired the magnificence, and the power, and a great many things; but I did not like the building. Not nearly so much as some others."
"Now I wish we could go to Paestum, and see what you would say to pure old Greek work. But it would be as much as our lives are worth, I suppose."
"Yes, Mr. Thayer," his wife cried; "don't talk about Paestum; they are going to-morrow to the point."
"The point? what point? the coast is full of points."
"The Punta di Campanella, papa," said Christina.
"I thought you were going to Capri?"
"We'll keep Capri till Sandie comes. He would be a help on the water.
All our marine excursions we will keep until Sandie comes. I only hope he'll be good and come."
The very air seemed full of pleasant anticipations; and Dolly would have been extremely happy; was happy; until on going in to dinner she saw the wineglasses on the table, and bottles suspiciously cooling in water. Her heart sank down, down. If she had had time and had dared, she would have remonstrated; but yet what could she say? She knew, too, that the wine at Mr. Thayer's table, like everything else on it, would be of the best procurable; better and more alluring than her father could get elsewhere. In her secret heart there was a bitter unspoken cry of remonstrance. O friends! O friends!--she was ready to say,--do you know what you are doing? You are dropping sweet poison into my life; bitter poison; deadly poison, where you little think it; and you do it with smiles and coloured glasses! She could hardly eat her dinner. She saw with indescribable pain and a sort of powerless despair, how Mr. Copley felt the license of his friend's house and example, and how the delicacy of the vintages offered him acted to dull his conscience; Mr. Thayer praising them and hospitably pressing his guest to partake. He himself drank very moderately and in a kind of mere matter-of-fact way; it was part of the dinner routine; and St.
Leger tasted, as a man who knows indeed what is good, but also makes it a matter of no moment; no more than his bread or his napkin. Mr. Copley drank with eager gusto, and glass after glass; even, Dolly thought, in a kind of bravado. And this would go on every day while their visit lasted; and perhaps not at dinner only; there were luncheons, and for aught she knew, suppers. Dolly's heart was hot within her; so hot that after dinner she could not keep herself from speaking on the subject to Christina. Yet she must begin as far from her father as possible. The two girls were sitting on the bank under a fig-tree, looking out on the wonderful spectacle of the bay of Naples at evening.
"There is a matter I have been thinking a great deal about lately," she said, with a little heartbeat at her daring.
"I daresay," laughed Christina. "That is quite in your way. Oh, I do wish Sandie would come! He _ought_ to be here."
"This is no laughing matter, Christina. It is a serious question."
"You are never anything but serious, are you?" said her friend. "If you have a fault, it is that, Dolly. You don't laugh enough."
Dolly was silent and swallowed her answer; for what did Christina know about it? _She_ had not to watch over her father; her father watched over her. Presently she began again; her voice had a little strain in its tone.
"This is something for you and me to consider; for you and me, and other women who can do anything. Christina, did you ever think about the use of wine?"
"Wine?" echoed Miss Thayer, a good deal mystified. "The use of it? I don't know any use of it, except to give people, gentlemen, something to talk of at dinner. Oh, it is good in sickness, I suppose. What are you thinking of?"
"I am thinking of the harm it does," said Dolly in a low voice.
"Harm? What harm? You are not one of those absurd people I have heard of, who cut down their apple-trees for fear the apples will be made into cider?"
"I have no apple-trees to cut down," said Dolly. "But don't you know, Christina, that there is such a thing as drinking too much wine? and what comes of it?"
"Not among our sort of people," said Christina. "I know there are such things as drunkards; but they are in the lower classes, who drink whisky and gin. Not among gentlemen."
Dolly choked, and turned her face away to hide the eyes full of tears.
"Too much wine?" Christina repeated. "One may have too much of anything. Too much fire will burn up your house; yet fire is a good thing."
"That's only burning up your house," said Dolly sorrowfully.
"_Only_ burning up your house! Dolly Copley, what are you thinking of?"
"I am thinking of something infinitely worse. I am thinking of a man losing his manhood; of families losing their stay and their joy, because the father, or the husband, or the brother, has lost himself!--gone down below his standing as an intellectual creature;--become a mere animal, given up to low pleasures which make him sink lower and lower in the scale of humanity. I am thinking of _his_ loss and of _their_ loss, Christina. I am thinking of the dreadfulness of being ashamed of the dearest thing you have, and the way hearts break under it. And don't you know that when the love of wine and the like gets hold of a person, it is stronger than he is? It makes a slave of him, so that he cannot help himself."
Christina's thoughts made a rapid flight over all the persons for whom Dolly could possibly fear such a fate, or in whom she could possibly have seen such an example. But Mr. St. Leger had the clear, fresh colour of perfect health and condition; Mr. Copley loved wine evidently, but drank it like a gentleman, and gave, to her eyes, no sign of being enslaved. What could Dolly be thinking of? Her mother was out of the question.
"I don't make out what you are at, Dolly," she said. "Such things do not happen in our class of society."
"Yes, they do. They happen in every class. And the highest ought to set an example to the lowest."
"No use if they did. Anyhow, Dolly, it is nothing you and I can meddle with."
"I think we ought not to have wine on our tables."
"Mercy! Everybody does that."
"It is offering temptation."
"To whom? Our friends are not that sort of people."
"How do you know but they may be? How can you tell but the taste or the tendency may be where you least think of it?"
"You don't mean that Mr. St. Leger has anything of that sort?" said Christina, facing round upon her.
"No more than other people, so far as I know. I am speaking in general, Christina. The thing is in the world; and we, I do think, we whose example would influence people,--I suppose everybody's example influences somebody else--I think we ought to do what we can."
"And not have wine on our dinner-tables!"
"Would that be so very dreadful?"
"It would be very inconvenient, I can tell you, and very disagreeable.
Fancy! no wine on the table. No one could understand it. And how our dinner-tables would look, Dolly, with the wine-glasses and the decanters taken off! And then, what would people talk about? Wine is such a help in getting through with a dinner-party. People who do not know anything else, and cannot talk of anything else, can taste wine; and have plenty to say about its colour, and its _bouquet_, and its age, and its growth, and its manufacture, and where it can be got genuine, and how it can be adulterated. And so one gets through with the dinner quite comfortably."
"I should not want to see people who knew no more than that," said Dolly.