It had been her first thought on arriving in San Pietro to pay a visit to the tombs of her ill-fated father and mother. Never having known them, she could not be expected to feel a very poignant or present grief, but the sadness of the story made a deep impression, and at times she tried to tell herself that within the storehouse of her memory there was a corner in which a black-bearded man, a-glitter with scarlet and gold, had place. A fancy, doubtless, and one that would have had no existence had she never left her Cornish home. But the knowledge that she had been born in the palace behind the town, helped the illusion, an illusion of a father, and she grappled it to her soul with all the strength of her loving nature.
Edward Sydney had, however, reasoning with the brain of your true conspirator, been firm. There was, to his mind, a grave risk to the living in a too demonstrative reverence for the dead. It is true he had agreed to one visit to the tombs, as ordinary tourists, and Galva gave a little shudder at the recollection.
She had looked through tear-dimmed eyes at the marble effigies of the monarchs, at the stern cameo of her father, and the cold beauty of her mother. In the latter figure the sculptor had with a cunning hand suggested the form of a little child beneath the drapery at the breasts. Galva had listened as in a dream to the little black-robed sacristan, whose duty it was to show the burial-place to visitors, as he had gabbled through the history of the tragedy. He described minutely the attack upon the palace and told of how the king and queen met their deaths. The baby princess Miranda had her share, too, in the history, and it was evident that no suspicion had ever come into the mind of the little sacristan that the body of the princess had not indeed been buried with the mother.
Galva noticed that the narrator carefully avoided mentioning the names of any who had taken part in the attack, and she found it hard to believe that such scenes could have ever taken place in this kingdom of gaiety and pleasure. There would have been a grim humour almost in this listening to the details of her own death when an infant, were the circumstances less pitiful. She had dropped a gold piece into the box for the masses for the dead, which the sacristan noticed, and he looked curiously at this pretty little tourist who gave so generously.