Francie Again (10 page)

“I really think, Aunt Lolly, that this is the right way to go traveling. I'd rather go with you any time than anybody else in Portugal,” said Francie. “It
is
a lovely place. We'll have to bring Pop and make a longer stay. But this is the right season, not too hot. I'm so glad Fontoura decided on a holiday just now.”

Mrs. Barclay made absent rejoinder; she was trying to negotiate cobbles and read the guidebook at one and the same time.

But it was Francie who spotted the building, which, though it had no sign they could read, nevertheless bore the indefinable look of a place open to the public.

“It's a kind of cathedral, I'm sure,” she said. Mrs. Barclay hesitated, but an old priest or monk, who had been lurking within the darkness, settled it by making his appearance in the sunlight and motioning them to come in. Though Mrs. Barclay explained to him in her best French that they spoke little Portuguese he continued to talk as he ushered them through an anteroom where a few large books and holy figures stood about as if in a museum. They went down into a cellar, and paused at a door over which hung what appeared to be a fairly lengthy poem. Their guide waved his hand at the words, inviting them to read.

Nos, ossos, que aqui estamos
,

Pelos vossos esperamos
.

“I can't make out a word,” said Francie in despair. “Does it make any sense to you, Aunt Lolly?”

“No more than to you, my dear. Isn't it miserable to be so stupid?”

However, they smiled gratefully at the old man and pretended for politeness' sake to have appreciated the legend. He led them through the door. Then he stepped back, smiling proudly, so that they could get the full effect.

They gasped. “What in the world?” said Francie.

“It's like the Sicilian catacombs, in a way,” said Mrs. Barclay, “but I don't think they are anything like as elaborate.”

They stood in a large room that seemed to be made completely of human bones. Hundreds and thousands of these grisly relics were embedded in walls and ceiling. Here the bones were chosen and arranged for their length, like giant matchsticks; there a number of differing lengths were disposed in the form of a star. One place was tastefully made of nothing but skulls.

“Is it real?” asked Francie in hushed tones. “Are they all genuine?”

Mrs. Barclay said that they were quite genuine. “I don't know where they all might have come from,” she added, “but you can be sure there was nothing criminal in it. Probably somebody stumbled on genuine catacombs, or perhaps they were excavating to build a big palace, and came upon a forgotten cemetery …” She paused at the sight of Francie's face, which in the dim light of the cellar was rather green. “It's not meant to be horrible, you know,” she said.

They had turned to go, and were in the middle of polite thanks to the old man when he suddenly lost interest in them. Other visitors were coming into the Bone Chapel. He hurried out to greet them.

“Who in the world, besides us, would be nutty enough to come here?” asked Francie.

The other party came through the door—three females in black. Francie looked at them carelessly at first, and then more fixedly. The youngest of the three women stared back. She moved closer, peering through the gloom.

“Francesca!” she cried.

“Catarina!” cried Francie. “What
are
you doing here?”

“I am with my cousins who have a
quinta
not far off. But you, Francesca, what brings you?”

Francie introduced her friend to Mrs. Barclay, but Catarina hesitated noticeably before performing her own introductions. She seemed reluctant, and Francie thought she detected a shade of fear in her eyes.

Still, the Portuguese ladies were amiable and courteous, and they seemed to take it very much as a natural thing that Catarina had made friends at art school. Francie understood enough of the language to know that Catarina was explaining her.

“I don't want to hold up your party,” she said, when everybody fell silent. “Mrs. Barclay and I were just going back to the hotel. We stopped to see this.” She gestured around her. “Catarina, do tell me if you can what it's all about. Is it really a chapel?”

“Oh yes. I always like to see it when I visit Evora.”

“But whatever's the idea? It seems such a queer thing to have built. Do they hold services here or anything?”

“It is not that kind of chapel,” said Catarina. “The people who built it thought the Portuguese might forget their spiritual duties. That little poem at the door—”

“Yes, do tell us what it means,” said Aunt Lolly.

Catarina solemnly said, “It means, ‘We bones who are here wait for yours.'”

There was a depressed hush, and then everybody said good-by.

Out in the air, Francie exhaled loudly and gratefully. “That awful place,” she said. “Just think of running into Catarina there! I'm sure it means something.”

Aunt Lolly said crisply that it merely meant Catarina and her cousins had been moved by the same spirit of sightseeing which activated themselves. “I see no reason for deeper significance,” she said. They walked for a long time in silence.

“Oh, I'm sure there's more to it than meets the eye. Poor Catarina. She looks haunted, I think, as if something tragic is always there in her life,” said Francie at last.

Mrs. Barclay sniffed. Then she said in gratified tones, “Here it is!”

Quite accidentally they had come out of a narrow street straight onto the Temple of Diana. It stood alone, exquisitely simple with its stone pillars and platform.

“That's something a lot better than any old bone chapel,” said Francie. “Let's take a good long look at it. I want to think about it last thing tonight, and forget all those skulls.”

Yet it was the skulls she remembered, as background to Catarina's delicately hollowed cheekbones and anxious, pleading eyes, until the thought of Pop's letter recurred to her and all other matters faded out. Francie did not sleep well that night.

CHAPTER 9

Fontoura was back and his students greeted him with a glad burst of effort, all except Francie. The world, her own little troubled world, followed her into the studio where it had no business to be, and she could not rid herself of it. Frivolous thoughts of parties, speculations as to Catarina, and, most especially, unhappy wonderings about Pop came between the painter and her work so persistently that Fontoura evidently saw her lack of interest. He practically gave up giving her any criticism at all.

A week of this uneasy state of mind nearly drove Francie to confide in Aunt Lolly, though Pop had not given her permission to do so. At last, however, a second letter from him put an end to suspense. It was as he had hinted before: his business was in trouble. In the first letter he had ever written to his daughter about adult affairs, he explained it.

“Things are pretty tight just now, tighter than I can remember them being in years. Naturally we expected a slight depression after the war and the boom and I was prepared for that, I thought. But what with this upset in the Middle East and one thing and another—”

Francie read it through, struggling with unfamiliar ideas. She knew she ought to be worried; she suspected Pop would actually have wanted her to show a certain amount of dismay. But at first her chief feeling was pride that he had talked to her as an equal. Then she began to muse about Pop as a person.

She dropped the letter to her lap and sat quietly, thinking back; she had never before tried to sum him up in just this way. It was almost impossible to think of her father as somebody needing anything—advice, or companionship, or help. He had always been in the picture just to supply all this.

Francie thought of the genial daddy of her baby years, a large, reassuring creature who dropped in at Aunt Norah's sometimes, like Santa Claus, with his pockets full of surprises. As she grew older, of course he seemed to shrink a little, but he was still Pop, the ultimate mainstay, the person who loved her and tried to spend as much time as he could with her. This had not been a great deal. Aunt Norah had always explained how his work kept him away, moving around the world, working mysterious miracles for her sake. Francie had accepted the pleasant fact that she was the chief reason for the magnificent man's efforts; she had long since stopped feeling surprise or gratification that this should be so.

Oh, there had been moments when she felt grateful. It was sweet of him, she recalled, when he made that tremendous effort to be there in Jefferson the first time she went to school—all the way from New York he had come, for the great day.

“You're going to be a big girl, aren't you?” he had said. “You're a brave girl. You won't cry. If you don't cry, as soon as you come home we'll go downtown together and buy the best pencil box we can find.”

“And if only he'd known,” reflected Francie, “I didn't need all that agonizing. I was dying to go to school like all the other kids in the block. Still, I was awfully glad to have the pencil box, and the doll, and the dress …” Her eyes were wet now, but she went on remembering.

There was that day she starred in the dancing-school show. Pop was terribly proud of her. He couldn't be there because he was in Iran, but he cabled and ordered a grown-up bouquet, and it was carried up the auditorium aisle and presented to her at the footlights.

Then the year in England when she had been tiresome, and Pop was patient and understanding—He could understand when he had time, and when he didn't have time he gave her presents.

“I don't know anybody who used to get more presents,” said Francie to herself. “I wish I could give him something now. Oh, I wish I could.”

A thought struck her suddenly. Wouldn't it be much better all around if she went straight home and told him she wanted to help? She thought longingly of Aunt Norah's house in Jefferson, and the safety there would be there. They could forget all this adventure; Pop could stay at home and they could live quietly …

But Pop might not
want
to live quietly. Quietness in Jefferson sounded very nice, but when Francie thought of Pop, she couldn't see him living in retirement, even in order to be the hero of a pretty story about a self-sacrificing daughter. And there was the cost of her passage home. Perhaps he just didn't have the money for that. Not to mention the high fees she had already paid with such a grand gesture to Fontoura. Pop would want her to get the good of that money, now it was paid.

With a deep pang, she pictured Jefferson in a cozy little glow of homesickness. It would be lovely to go home now, and walk down Main Street with Ruth, looking idly into the store windows before stopping in at the drug store for a double malted. It would be bliss to go out with the gang on Saturday night to the Homburg Hat for a few dances. It would be marvelous to dance with Glenn again, and try to trick him into saying something polite for a change. Dear old Glenn, always criticizing her, but crazy about her just the same. A girl needed a boy like that, Francie decided sagely. A girl wanted a boy around whom she was used to, who was used to her. Oh, it would be wonderful to go home now to Jefferson, but—

“I've got to stay for the rest of the year,” Francie told herself. “I've just got to.”

She stood up briskly and went to the dressing table to fix her face, the reflection of which gave her a shock. She looked a woebegone being with her eyes red and her nose pink. “Oh, come on,” she said to the girl in the looking glass, “you have it pretty good, after all. The girls at home would all give anything for your chances. A year abroad! What have you got to howl about?”

In that light, it all seemed much less gloomy. Just the same she wished she could help Pop. She sat down to write and tell him so.

The Japanese say, “Bees sting a crying face.” Francie had written and stamped her letter before she remembered she had another envelope from America which she had not yet opened. Turning it over now, she saw the name and address of Peggy Pierce, one of the girls from Jefferson School.

“That goon!” muttered Francie, in unkind surprise, for Peggy was not at all an intimate friend. The others were rather afraid of her; she was quick-witted and malicious. “I wonder why she's writing to me? To tell me something I won't like, I bet.”

Still, any word from home was welcome. Ruth and Glenn had both been dilatory lately, and Francie was cheerful as she slit the envelope. For two pages, Peggy was harmless. She prattled in a routine way about school activities, football games and so on. Francie was about to sigh with relief as she neared the signature, but relief departed suddenly at the last paragraph.

“What do you think of Gretta
now?
Personally I've always considered her a drip, and I never could figure out what Glenn sees in her, after you. I decided a long time ago it was a case of any port in a storm, and you're always somewhere on the other side of the map, so why not Gretta? But I could be wrong, and I'll tell you why we all think so. The other night at the Homburg Hat, when we were in powdering our noses, she opened her sweater a little while she was washing the old face, and I spotted a ring on a chain round her neck. Diamonds, no less. Not very big ones, but definitely diamonds. She saw me eying it and buttoned up but swiftly. Well, what do
you
think?”

“This is not a tragedy at all,” said Francie to herself. “I don't really care the least little bit. I'm not in love with Glenn. I haven't any right to hang on to him. I couldn't expect anybody to go on waiting while I rush off to Europe all the time …”

She crumpled up the sheet of paper and threw it on the floor, and put her head down on her arms to think it over.

“I am
not
crying,” she told herself sharply. “Or if I am, it's because of Pop. I'm not homesick or unhappy. And I don't mind a bit if Glenn's engaged.”

Outside the window the spring sky deepened to a brilliant blue, and narrow whitecaps curled along the edges of the waves. The early morning procession of fisherfolk was thinning out; the broad boulevard began to hum with motor cars. In a chapel near the beach, a bell rang, and Francie sat up, seized with swift alarm. Nine o'clock! She would be awfully late to class. Mechanically she made up her face. It badly needed it after so much emotion.