He knew at once that she was from Home, though as she sat opposite him with the fingers of her mended gloves laced under her chin and her face turned away to miss no point of the cypresses and warm, illumined walls, there was nothing to prove that any one of a hundred towns might not have produced her. Peter remembered what sort of people wore gloves like that in Bloombury—the minister's wife, the school teacher, his mother and Ellen—and was instantly sure she would not have been travelling through Italy first-class except at the instigation of the large, widowed and distrustful woman with whom she got on at Padua. This lady, also, Peter understood very well. He thought it likely she sat in rocking chairs a great deal at home and travelled to improve her mind. She had, moreover, a general air of proclaiming the unwarrantableness of railway acquaintances, which alone would have prevented Peter fromasking the girl, as he absurdly wanted to, if they had painted the new school-house yet, and if there had been much water that year in Miller's pond.
As she sat so with her round hat pushed askew by the window-glass, there was some delicate reminder about her that streaked the rich Italian landscape with vestiges of Bloombury.
He looked out of the window where she looked and saw the white straight-sided villas change to green-shuttered farmhouses, and fine old Roman roads lead on to Harmony. It was all there for him in its unexpectedness, as freshly touching as those reminders of his mother which he came upon occasionally where Ellen kept them laid by in lavender; as if the girl had shaken from the folds of her jacket of unmistakable Bloombury cut, Youth for him—his own—anybody's Youth—no limp and yellowed keepsake, but all crisply done up and ready for putting on. So sharp for the moment was his sense of accepting the invitation to put it on with her as the best possible traveller's guise, especially for seeing Venice in, that catchingthe speculative eye of the large lady turned upon him, he quailed sensibly. She had the air of having detected him in an attempt to establish a relation with her companion on the ground of their common youngness, and finding herself much more a match for him both in years and in respect to their common origin. Whatever passed between the two women, and something did pass wordlessly, with hardly so much substance as a look, remained there, not intrusively, but as proof that what he had been seeking was still going on in some far but attainable place. It was the first movement of an accomplished recovery, for Peter to find himself resisting the implication of his appearance in favour of what was coming to him out of the retouched, sensitive surfaces of his past.
He knew so well as he looked at the girl, what had produced her. She was leaning a little from the window in a way that brought more of her face into view, and though from where he sat Peter could have very little notion of the points of the nearing landscape, he knew by what he saw of her, that somewhere acrossthe low runnels in the windy reeds she had caught sight of the "sea birds' nest."
He did not on that account change his position so that he might have a glimpse of the dark hills of Arqua or the towers of Venice repeating themselves in the lustrous, spacious sea. Sitting opposite the girl, he saw in her following eyes the silver trails of water and the dim procession down them of old loves, old wars, old splendours, much better than the thin line of the landscape presented them to his weary sense. He leaned back as far as the stiff seat allowed, watching the Old World shine on her face, where the low light, striking obliquely on the water, turned it white above black shoals of weed. For the first time since his illness his mind slipped the leash of maimed desire, and as if it parted for him there beyond the window of the railway carriage, struck into the trail to the House. The walls of it rose up straight and shining, gilded purely; the windows arching to summer blueness, let in with them the smell of the wilding rose at the turn of the road and the evening clamour of the birds in Bloombury wood.
All this time Peter had been sitting in an Italian railway carriage, knee to knee with a pirate bearded Austrian Jew who gave him the greatest possible occasion for wishing the window opened, and when the jar of the checked train drew him into consciousness again, he was at a loss to know what had set him off so far until he caught sight of the girl. She was buttoning on her jacket with fingers that trembled with excitement as she constrained herself to the recapitulation of the two suitcases, the hat box and three parcels which her companion in order to have well in hand, had been alternately picking up and dropping ever since they sighted the tower of San Georgio dark against the sea streaked west.
"Two and one is three and three is six and the'Baedeker'and the umbrellas," said the girl. "No, I don't have to look in the address book. I have it by heart. Casa Frolli, the Zattera." Then the roar of the train split into the sharp cries of thefacchinosthat carried them forward like an explosion into Venice as it rose statelily from the rippling lustre. Around it wove the black riders with still,communicating prows, so buoyant, so mysteriously alive and peering, like some superior sea creatures risen magically from below the frayed reflection of the station lights. Much as Peter felt that he owed to the vivid presence of the girl, his new capacity to see and feel it so as it burst upon them, he hadn't found the courage to address her. So it was with a distinct sense of deprivation that he saw her with her companion grasping the side of the gondola as if by that method to keep it afloat, disappearing down the dim water lanes in the direction of the Zattera.
It was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at theBritania, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitenedhead, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever interested him.
It did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of Venice, that he had not thought once of Eunice Goodward, but only of those who had touched his life without hurting it. He was so far indeed from thinking of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet her again.
"I must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."
He looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals, for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round hat who might have come from Bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the day after, and in the meantime Venice took him.
The ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. It was, as he told himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him, that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his dreams, missed them both on his own account.
It was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of Venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty droves of doves. High over the doorthe gold horses of Lysippus breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approachingtemporale. He was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as it had been in the House!
It was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. He climbed up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which had failed to preserveto him any image of how his father looked, and yet had so furnished all his imagination. Which didn't make any less of a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, Peter Weatheral, of the firm of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Real Estate Brokers, what it was all about.
"It's a picture-book of the heart of man," he concluded, and no sooner had he shaped this thought in his mind than he heard it uttered for him on the opposite side of the pillar in a voice made soft by indulgent tenderness, "Just a great picture-book." He leaned forward at the sound far enough to have a glimpse of the Girl from Home, and smiled at her.
"So you've found that out, have you?" It was not strange to find himself addressing her friendlily nor to hear her answer him.
"Just a picture-book," she repeated. "It explains so much. What the saints were to them, and the Holy Personages. Monkish tales to prey upon their superstition, we were taught. But you can see here what they really were, the wonder tales of a people, the fairy wonder and the blessed happenings come true as they do in dreams. Oh, it must have been agood time when the saints were on the earth."
"You believe in them, then?"
"Here in San Marco, yes. But not when I am in Bloombury."
"Oh!" cried Peter, "are you really from Bloombury? I knew you were from up country but I hardly dared to hope—if you will permit me——" He searched for his card which she accepted without looking at it.
"You are Mr. Peter Weatheral, aren't you? Mrs. Merrithew thought she recognized you yesterday."
"Is that why she glared at me so? But anyway I am obliged to her, though I haven't vestige of a recollection of her."
"She didn't suppose you had. Her husband sold you some land once. But of course everybody in Bloombury knows the Mr. Weatheral who went from there to the city and made his fortune."
"A sorry one," said Peter. "But if you are really from Bloombury why don't I remember you? I go there with Ellen every summer, andsheknows everybody."
"Yes; she is so kind. Everybody says that.But I'm really from Harmony. I taught the Bloombury school last year. I am Savilla Dassonville."
"Oh, I knew your father then! Now that I come to think of it, it was he who laid the foundation of my greatness," Peter smiled whimsically. "And I knew your mother; she was a very lovely lady."
He realized as the girl's eyes filled with tears, that this must have been the child at whose birth, he had heard, the mother had died. "But I suppose we mustn't talk about Bloombury in San Marco," he blamed his inadvertence, "though that doesn't seem to want talking about either. When you said that just now about its being a picture-book, I was thinking how like it was to one of those places I used to go to in my youth—you know where you go in your mind when you don't like the place where you are. So like. I used to call it the House of the Shining Walls."
"I know," she nodded, "mine is a garden."
"Is?" said Peter. "There's where you have the advantage of me."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, spreading her handstoward the pictured wall and the springing domes, "isn't this the evidence that itisalways. Let us look."
The mass was over and the crowd departing; they moved from page to page to the storied wall and identified in it the springs of a common experience.
"It's like nothing so much," said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on the ground."
"Something like that," admitted Peter.
"And that's why," said Miss Dassonville, "it doesn't make me feel atallreligious. Just—just—maternal."
It appeared by this time they had become well enough acquainted for Peter to remark that she didn't seem to feel under any obligation to experience the prescribed and traditional thrill.
"Well, I'm divided in my mind. I don't want to overlook any of the facts, and I want to give the poor imprisoned things a chance, if they have anything to say that the guide books have missed, to get it off their minds. I've alwaysheard that celebrities grow tired of being forever taken at their public valuation. I've got aBaedekerand aHareandThe Stones of Venicebut I neglect them quite as much as I read them, don't you?"
They had come down into the nave and she went about stroking the fair marbles delicately as though there sprang a conscious communication from the touch. He felt his mindaccommodatingto the ease of hers with a movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that the cloud mass which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved in rain.
"And I haven't even an umbrella," explained Miss Dassonville with a real dismay.
"But I'll take you home in my gondola," it appeared to him providentially provided for this contingency; "it is here at the Piazzetta."
"Oh, have you a gondola, and is it as much of a help as people say? Mrs. Merrithew hates walking, but we didn't know if we should like it."
They whisked around the corner under thearcade of the ducal palace, and almost before they reached thetraghettothe shower was stayed and the sun came out on the lucent water. Peter allowed Miss Dassonville to give the direction lest she should think it a liberty of him to have noticed and remembered it, but he added something to it that caused her, as they swung out into the canal, to enter an expostulation.
"But this is not the way to the Casa Frolli!"
"It's one way; besides, it isn't raining any more, and if you are thinking of taking a gondola you ought to make a trial trip or two, and it's worth seeing how the palace looks from the canal."
The rain began again in a little while, whitening the water; the depth of it blackened to the cloud but the surface frothed like quicksilver under the steady patter. The awning was up and they were safe against a wetting, but Peter saw the girl shiver in the slight chill, and looking at her more attentively he perceived that she might recently have been ill. The likeness to her mother came out then in spite of her plainness, the hands, the eyes, the pleasant way ofsmiling; it was that no doubt which had set him on the trail of his old dreams. He tried, more for the purpose of avoiding it than for any curiosity, to remember what he had ever heard of David Dassonville that would account for his daughter's teaching school when she evidently wasn't able for it, but he talked of Mrs. Merrithew.
"I must call on her," he said, "as soon as she will permit me. But tell me, what business did I do with her husband?"
"It was a mortgage—those poor McGuires, you know, were in such trouble, and you——"
"Yes, I was always nervous about mortgages. I was bitten by one once. But dear me, I did not expect to have my youthful indiscretions coming out like this. What else did she tell you?"
The girl laughed delightedly. "Well, we did rather talk you over. She said you were such a good son. Even when you were a young man on a salary your mother had a best black silk and a second best."
"Women are the queerest!" Peter commented at large. "It was always such a comfortto Ellen that mother had a good silk to be buried in. Now what is there talismanic about silk?"
"It's evidence," she smiled, "and that's what women require most."
"Well, I hope Mrs. Merrithew will accept it as evidence that I am a suitable person to take you out in a gondola this evening. You haven't seen Venice by night?"
"Only as we came from the station. I'm sure she would like you to call, and I hope she will like the gondola."
"Oh, she will like it," Peter assured Miss Dassonville as he helped her out in front of the Casa Frolli; "it will remind her of a rocking chair."
Mrs. Merrithew did like the gondola; she liked everything:—the spacious dark, the scudding forms like frightened swans, the sound of singing on the water, the soft bulks of foliage that overhung them in the narrowcalle, the soundless hatchet-faced prows that rounded on them from behind dim palaces; and she liked the gondola so much that she asked Peter "right out" what it cost him.
"We would have taken one ourselves," she explained without waiting, "only we didn't feel able to afford it. Fifty francs a week they wanted to charge us, but maybe that was because we were Americans; they think Americans can do everything over here. But I suppose you get yours cheap at the hotel?"
"Oh, much cheaper."
"How much?"
"Forty francs," hazarded Peter. "I'm sure I could get you one for that. Unless ... if you don't mind...." He made what he hadn't done yet under any circumstances, a case out of his broken health to explain how by not getting up very early and by taking some prescribed exercise, Giuseppe and the gondola had to lie unused half the mornings, which was very bad for them.... "So," he persuaded them, "if you would be satisfied with it for half a day, I would be very much obliged to you if you would take it ... share and share alike." There was as much hesitation in Peter's speech as if it had really been the favour he seemed to make it, though in fact it grew out of his attempt to fashion his offer by whathe saw in the dusk of Miss Dassonville's face. "In the evenings," he finished, "we could take it turn about. There are a great many evenings when I don't go out at all."
"Me, too," consented Mrs. Merrithew cheerfully. "I get tired easy, but you and Savilla could go." The proposal appealed to her as neighbourly, and it was quite in keeping with the character of a successful business man, as he was projected on the understanding of Bloombury, to wish not to keep paying for a thing of which he had no use. "I think we might as well close with it at once, don't you, Savilla?"
"If you are sure it's only forty francs——" Miss Dassonville was doubtful.
"Quite sure," Peter was very prompt. "You see they keep them so constantly employed at the hotel"—which seemed satisfactorily to make way for the arrangement that the gondola was to call for the two ladies the next morning.
"Giuseppe," Weatheral demanded as he stepped out of the gondola at the hotel landing, "how much do I pay you?"
"Sixty francs,Signore."
Peter had no doubt the extra ten was divided between his own man and the gondolier, but he was not thinking of that.
"I have a very short memory," he said, "and I have told theSignoraand theSignorinaforty francs. If they ask you, you are to tell them forty francs; and listen, Beppe, every franc over that you tell them, I shall deduct from yourpourboirewhen I leave, do you understand?"
"Si, Signore."
A morning or two after the arrangement about the gondola Peter was leaning over the bridge of San Moise watching the sun on the copper vessels the women brought to the fountain, when his man came to him. This Luigi he had picked up at Naples for the chief excellence of his English and a certain seraphic bearing that led Peter to say to him that he would cheerfully pay a much larger wage if he could only be certain Luigi would not cheat him.
"OhSignore!In Italy?Impossible!"
"In that case," said Peter, "if you can't be honest with me, be as honest as you can"—but he had to accept the lifted shoulders and the Raphael smile as his only security. However, Luigi had made him comfortable and as he approached him now it was without any misgiving.
"I have just seen Giuseppe and the gondola," he announced. "They are at the Palazza Rezzonico, and after that they go to San Georgio degli Sclavoni. There are pictures there."
"Oh!" said Peter.
"It is a very little way to the San Georgio," volunteered Luigi as they remained, master and man, looking down into the water in the leisurely Venetian fashion. "Across the Piazza," said Luigi, "a couple of turns, a bridge or two and there you are;" and after a long pause, "The signoreis looking very well this morning. Exercise in the sea air is excellent for the health."
"Very," said Peter. "I shall go for a walk, I think. I shall not need you, Luigi."
Nevertheless Luigi did not lose sight of him until he was well on his way to Saint George of the Sclavoni which announced itself by theramping fat dragon over the door. There was the young knight riding him down as of old, and still no Princess.
"She must be somewhere on the premises," said Peter to himself. "No doubt she has preserved the traditions of her race by remaining indoors." He had not, however, accustomed his eyes to the dusk of the little room when he heard at the landing the scrape of the gondola and the voices of the women disembarking.
"If we'd known you wanted to come," explained Mrs. Merrithew heartily, "we could have brought you in the boat." That was the way she oftenest spoke of it, and other times it was the gondola.
Peter explained his old acquaintance with the charging saint and his curiosity about the lady, but when the custodian had brought a silver paper screen to gather the little light there was upon the mellow old Carpaccio, he looked upon her with a vague dissatisfaction.
"It's the same dragon and the same young man," he admitted. "I know him by the hair and by the determined expression. But I'm not sure about the young lady."
"You are looking for a fairy-tale Princess," Miss Dassonville declared, "but you have to remember that the knight didn't marry this one; he only made a Christian of her."
They came back to it again when they had looked at all the others and speculated as to whether Carpaccio knew how funny he was when he painted Saint Jerome among the brethren, and whether in the last picture he was really in heaven as Ruskin reported.
"So you think," said Peter, "she'd have been more satisfactory if the painter had thought Saint George meant to marry her?"
"More personal and convincing," the girl maintained.
"There's one in the Belle Arti that's a lot better looking to my notion," contributed Mrs. Merrithew.
"Oh, but that Princess is running away," the girl protested.
"It's what any well brought up young female would be expected to do under the circumstances," declared the elder lady; "just look at them fragments. It's enough to turn the strongest."
"It does look a sort of 'After the Battle,'" Peter admitted. "But I should like to see the other one," and he fell in very readily with Mrs. Merrithew's suggestion that he should come in the gondola with them and drop into the Academy on the way home. They found the Saint George with very little trouble and sat down on one of the red velvet divans, looking a long time at the fleeing lady.
"And you think," said Peter, "she would not have run away?"
"I think she shouldn't; when it's done for her."
"But isn't that—the running away I mean—the evidence of her being worth doing it for, of her fineness, of her superior delicacy?"
"Well," Miss Dassonville was not disposed to take it lightly, "if a woman has a right to a fineness that's bought at another's expense. They can't all run away, you know, and I can't think it right for a woman to evade the disagreeable things just because some man makes it possible."
"I believe," laughed Peter, "if you had been the Princess you would have killed the dragonyourself. You'd have taken a little bomb up your sleeve and thrown it at him." He had to take that note to cover a confused sense he had of the conversation being more pertinent than he could at that moment remember a reason for its being.
"Oh, I've been delivered to the dragons before now," she said. "It's going on all the time." She moved a little away from the picture as if to avoid the personal issue.
"What beats me," commented Mrs. Merrithew, "is that there has to be a young lady. You'd think a likely young man, if he met one of them things, would just kill it on general principles, the same as a snake or a spider."
"Oh," said Peter, "it's chiefly because they are terrifying to young ladies that we kill them at all. Yes, there has to be a young lady." He was aware of an accession of dreariness in the certainty that in his case there never could be a young lady. But Miss Dassonville as she began to walk toward the entrance gave it another turn.
"Thereisalways a young lady. The difficulty is that it must be a particular one. Noone takes any account of those who were eaten up before the Princess appeared."
"But you must grant," said Peter, with an odd sense of defending his own position, "that when one got done with a fight like that, one would be entitled to something particular."
"Oh, if it came as a reward," she laughed. "But nowadays we've reversed the process. One makes sure of the Princess first, lest when the dragon is killed she should prove to have gone away with one of the bystanders."
Something that clicked in Peter's mind led him to look sharply from one to the other of the two women. In Bloombury they had a way, he knew, of not missing any point of their neighbours' affairs, but their faces expressed no trace of an appreciation of anything in the subject being applicable to his. The flick of memory passed and left him wondering why it should be.
He caught himself looking covertly at the girl as the gondola swung into open water, to discover in her the springs of an experience such as lay at the source of his own desolation. He perceived instead under her slight appearancea certain warmth and colour like a light behind a breathed-on window-pane. Illness, overwork, whatever dragon's breath had dimmed her surfaces, she gave the impression of being inwardly inexhaustibly alight and alive. Something in her leaped to the day, to the steady pacing of the gondola on the smooth water tessellated by the sun in blue and bronze and amber, to the arched and airy palaces that rose above it.
The awning was up; there was strong sun and pleasant wind: from hidden gardens they smelled the oleanders. Peter felt the faint stir of rehabilitation like the breath of passing presences.
The mood augmented in him as he drifted late that evening on the lagoon beyond the Guidecca, after the sun was gone down and the sea and the sky reflected each to each, one roseate glow like a hollow shell of pearl. Lit peaks of the Alps ranged in the upper heaven, and nearer the great dome of the Saluti signalled whitely; below them, all the islands near and far floated in twilit blueness on the flat lagoon. There was by times, a long sea swell,and no sound but the tread of the oar behind like a woman's silken motion. It drew with it films of recollection in which his mood suspended like gossamer, a mood capable of going on independently of his idea of himself as a man cut off from those experiences, intimations of which pressed upon him everywhere by line and form and colour.
It had come back, the precious intimacy of beauty, with that fullness sitting there in the gondola, he realized with the intake of the breath to express it and the curious throbbing of the palms to grasp. He was able to identify in his bodily response to all that charged the decaying wonder of Venice with opulent personality, the source of his boyish dreams. It was no woman, he told himself, who had gone off with the bystanders while he had been engaged with the dragons of poverty and obligation, but merely the appreciations of beauty. There had never been any woman, there was never going to be. He began to plan how he should explain his discovery and the bearing of it, to Miss Dassonville. It would be a pity if she were making the same mistake about it.He leaned back in the cushioned seat and watched the silver shine of the prow delicately peering out its way among the shadowy islands; lay so still and absorbed that he did not know which way they went nor what his gondolier inquired of him, and presently realized without surprise that the Princess was speaking to him.
He felt her first, warm and friendlily, and then he heard her laughing. He knew she was the Princess though she had no form or likeness.
"But which are you?" he whispered to the laughter.
"The right one."
"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"
"Oh, if you don't know by this time! I have come to take you to the House."
"Are you the one who was always there?"
"The Lovely Lady; there was never any other."
"And shall I go there as I used?" asked Peter, "and be happy there?"
"You are free to go; do you not feel it?"
"Oh, here—I feel many things. I am justbeginning to understand how I came to lose the way to it."
"Are you so sure?"
"Quite." Peter's new-found certainty was strong in him. "I made the mistake of thinking that the House was the House of Love, and it is really the House of Beauty. I thought if I found the one to love, I should live in it forever. But now that I have found the way back to it I see that was a mistake."
"How did you find it?"
"Well, there is a girl here——"
"Ah!" said the Princess.
"She is young," Peter explained; "she looks at things the way I used to, and that somehow brought me around to the starting-point again."
"I see," said the Princess; the look she turned on him was full of a strange, secret intelligence which as he returned it without knowing what it was about, afforded Peter the greatest satisfaction. "Do you know me now," she said at last, "which one I am?"
"The right one, I am sure of that."
"But which?"
"I know now," Peter answered, "but I amcertain that in the morning I shall not be able to remember."
It was true as Peter had said that the next morning he was in as much doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that lapped the fore-shore of remembrance.
After an hour in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he thought it might have been the Princess for the first word or two, until he turned and saw Miss Dassonville. She was staring at the dim old canvases patched with saints, and her eyes were tender.
"They are not really saints, you know, theyare only a sort of hieroglyphics that spell devotion. It isn't as though they had the breath of life breathed into them and could come down from their canvases as some of them do."
"Oh," he protested, "did you think of that for yourself? It was the Princess who said it to me."
"The Princess of the Dragon?"
"She came to me last night on the lagoon. It was wonderful,—the water shine and the rosy glow. I was wishing I had insisted on your coming, and all at once there was the Princess."
"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"
"She declined to commit herself. I suppose it's one of the things a man has to find out." He experienced a great lift of his spirit in the girl's light acceptance of his whimsicality, it was the sort of thing that Eunice Goodward used to be afraid to have any one hear him say lest they should think it odd. It occurred to him as he turned and walked beside Miss Dassonville that if he had come to Italy with Eunice there might have been a great deal that she would not have liked to hear. He couldthink things of that sort of her now with a queer lightness as of ease after strain, and yet not think it a merit of Miss Dassonville's so to ease him. They walked through the rooms full of the morning coolness, and let the pictures say what they would to them.
"It is strange to me," said the girl, "the reality of pictures; as if they had reached a point under the artist's hand where they became suddenly independent of him and went about saying a great deal more than he meant and perhaps more than he could understand. I am sure they must have a world of their own of picture rock and tree and stone, where they go when they are not being looked at on their canvases."
"Oh, haven't you found them, then?"
"In dreams you mean? Not in Bloombury; they don't get so far from home. One of these little islands I suspect, that lie so low and look so blue and airy."
"Will you go with me in the gondola to discover it?"
"To-night?"
"To-morrow." He was full of a plan to take her and Mrs. Merrithew to the Lido that sameevening to have dinner, and to come home after moonrise, to discover Venice. She agreed to that, subject to Mrs. Merrithew's consent, and they went out to find that lady at a bead shop where she spent a great many hours in a state of delightful indecision.
Mrs. Merrithew proving quite in the mood for it, they went to the Lido with an extra gondolier—Miss Dassonville had stipulated for one who could sing—and came home in time to see Venice all a-flower, with the continual slither of the gondolas about it like some slim sort of moth. They explored Saint George of the Sea Weed after that, took tea in the public gardens and had a day at Torcello. On such occasions when Peter and Mrs. Merrithew talked apart, the good lady who got on excellently with the rich Mr. Weatheral grew more than communicative on the subject of Savilla Dassonville. It was not that she talked of the girl so much nor so freely, but that she left him with the sense of her own exasperation at the whole performance. It was a thin little waif of a story as it came from Mrs. Merrithew, needing to be taken in and comforted before it wouldyield even to Peter, who as a rich man had come to have a fair discernment in pitiable cases, the faint hope of a rescue. There had been, to begin with, the death of the girl's mother at her birth, followed by long years of neglect growing out of just that likeness to the beloved wife which first excited her father's aversion and afterward became the object of a jealous, insistent tenderness.
After his wife's death, Dave Dassonville had lost his grip on his property as he had on all the means of living. Later he was visited by a stringency which Mrs. Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence, which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its consequences. Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that she had taught the village school.
The winter before, tramping through the heavy snow, she had contracted a bronchitis that had developed so alarmingly as to demand, by the authority of the local doctor, "a tripsomewhere"—"and nobody," said Mrs. Merrithew, "but me to go with her."
"Not," she added, "that I'm complainin'. Merrithew left me well off, and there's no denyin' travellin's improvin' to the mind, though at my age it's some wearin' to the body. I'm glad," she further confided to Peter at Torcello, "she takes so to Venice. It's a lot more comfortable goin' about in a gondola. At Rome, now, I nearly run my legs off."
It was later when Savilla had been kept at home by a slight indisposition from a shower that caught them unprepared, she expressed her doubt of a winter in Italy being anything more than a longer stick with which to beat a dog.
"She will have spent all her money on it, and the snow will be just as deep in Bloombury next year. There isn't anythingreallythe matter with her, but she's just too fine for it. It's like seeing a clumsy person handlin' one of them spun glass things, the way I have to sit still and see Providence dealing with Savilla Dassonville. It may be sort of sacrilegious to say so, but I declare it gives me the fidgets."
It ought of course to have given Peter, seeingthe interest he took in her, a like uneasiness; but there was something in the unmitigated hardness of her situation that afforded him the sort of easement he had, inexplicably, in the plainness of her dress. His memory was not working well enough yet for him to realize that it was relief from the strain of the secondary feminity that had fluttered and allured in Eunice Goodward.
It was even more unclearly that he recognized that it had been a strain. All this time he had been forgetting her—and how completely he had forgotten her this new faculty for comparison was proof—he had still been enslaved by her appearance. It was an appearance, that of Eunice's, which he admired still in the young American women at the expensive hotels where he had put up, and admitted as the natural, the inevitable sign of an inward preciousness. But if he allowed to himself that he would never have spoken to Savilla Dassonville that day at San Marco, if she had been to the eye anything that Eunice Goodward was, he told himself it was because he was not sure from behind which of those charming ambuscades the arrows ofdesolation might be shot. If he gave himself up now to the play of the girl's live fancy he did so in the security of her plainness, out of which no disturbing surprises might come. And she left him, in respect to her hard conditions, without even the excuse for an attitude. Eunice had been poor in her world, and had carried it with just that admixture of bright frankness and proud reserve which, in her world, supported such a situation with most charm. She made as much use of her difficulties as a Spanish dancer of her shawl; but Savilla Dassonville was just poor, and that was the end of it. That he got on with her so well by the simple process of talking out whatever he was most interested in, occurred to Peter as her natural limitation. It was not until they had been going out together for a week or more, in such fashion as his mending health allowed, that he had moments of realizing, in her swift appropriations of Venice, rich possibilities of the personal relations with which he believed himself forever done. Oddly it provoked in him the wish to protect, when the practical situation had left him dry and bare.
It was the evening of theSerenata. They were all there in the gondola, Mrs. Merrithew and the girl, with Luigi squatting by Giuseppe, not too far from the music float that sprang mysteriously from the black water in arching boughs of red and gold and pearly Aladdin's fruit. Behind them the lurking prows rustled and rocked drunkenly with the swell to which they seemed at times attentively to lean. They could make out heads crowded in the gondolas, and silver gleams of the prows as they drifted past palaces lit intermittently by a red flare that wiped out for the moment, the seastain and disfiguring patches of restoration.
They had passed the palace of Camerleigh. The jewel-fruited arbour folded and furled upon itself to pass the slow curve of the Rialto, and suddenly, Peter's attention, drawn momentarily from the music, was caught by that other bright company leaning from deserted balconies, swarming like the summer drift between the pillars of dark loggias. They were all there, knights and saints and ladies, out of print and paint and marble, and presently hemade out the Princess. She was leaning out of one of the high, floriated windows, looking down on him with pleased, secret understanding as she might have smiled from her palace walls on the festival that brought the young knight George home with the conquered dragon. It was the compressed and pregnant meaning of her gaze that drew his own upward, and it was then when the Lovely Lady turned and waved her hand at him that he felt the girl stir strangely beside him.
"How full the night is of the sense of presences," she said, "as if all the loved marbles came to life and the adored had left their canvases. I cannot think but it is so."
"Oh, I am sure of it."
She moved again with the vague restlessness of one stared upon by innumerable eyes. "How one would like to speak," she said. "They seem so near us."
There was a warm tide of that nearness rising in Peter's blood. As the music flowed out again in summer fullness, he put out his arm along the back of the seat instinctively in answer to the girl's shy turning, the natural movementof their common equity in the night's unrealized wonder.
"Peter! oh, Peter!"
It was dark in the room when Peter awoke, but he knew it was morning by the salt smell which he thought came into the room from the cove beyond Bloombury pastures, until he roused in his bed and knew it for the smell of the lagoons. He looked out to see the beginning of rose light on the world and understood that he was called. He did not hear the voice again but out there in the shimmering space the call awaited him. It might be the Princess.
He dressed and got down quietly into the shadowed city and waked a frowsy gondolier asleep in his gondola. They spoke softly, both of them, before the morning hush, as they swung out into the open water between the towers of San Georgio fairily dim, and the pillars of the saints; the city floated in a mist of blueness, the dome of the Saluti faintly pearled.
"Dove, Signore?" The gondolier feathered his oar.
"Un giro"—Peter waved his arm seaward; the dip of the oar had a stealthy sound in the deserted dawning. They passed the public gardens and saw the sea widen and the morning quicken. Islands swam up out of silver space, took form and colour, and there between the islands he saw the girl. She had gotten another oar from Giuseppe and stood delighting in the free motion; her sleeves were rolled up, her hat was off, her hair blew out; alive and pliant she bent to the long sweep of it, and her eyes were on the morning wonder. But when she caught sight of Peter she looked only at him and he knew that her seeing him appearing thus on the shining water was its chief and exquisite wonder, and that she did not know what he saw. The gondolier steered straight for the girl without advice; he had thought privately that theSignore Americanowas a little mad, but he knew now with what manner of madness.
They drew close and drifted alongside. Peter did not take his eyes from the girl's eyes lest for her to look away ever so slightly from thereto his face would be to discover that he knew; and he did not know how he stood with himself toward that knowledge.
"Oh," she said breathlessly, "I wanted you—I called you—and you came! You did not know where I was and yet you came?"
"I heard you calling."
She left her oar and sat down; Peter laid his hand on the edge of her gondola and they drifted side by side.
"May I come with you?" he asked presently.
She made a little gesture, past all speech. Peter held up a hand full of silver toward his gondolier and laid it on the seat as he stepped lightly over. The man slid away from them without word or motion, and together they faced the morning. It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of burnished light; islands lifted in mirage, floated miraculously upon the verge of space. Behind them the mainland banked like a new created world over which waited the Hosts of the ranked Alps. Winged boats from Murano slid through the flat lagoons.
There was very little to say. Peter was aware chiefly, in what came from her to him,of the wish to be very tender toward it, of having it in hand to support her securely above the abyss into which he felt at the least rude touch of his, she must immeasurably fall. At the best he could but keep with her there at the point of her unconsciousness by knowing the truth himself, as he felt amazingly that he did know it with all the completeness of his stripped and beggared past.
They drifted and saw the morning widen into the working-day. Market boats piled with fruit, fish in shining heaps, wood boats of Istria, went by with Madonna painted sails. Among the crowded goods the women sat Madonna-wise and nursed their bambini, or cherishing the recurrent hope, knitted interminably. If he wanted any evidence of what he admitted between the girl and himself it flashed out for him in the faces of the market wives, on whom labour and maternity sat not too heavily to cloud the primal radiance. It was there in their softBuon giornoin the way they did not, as the gondola drew beside them, cover their fruitful breasts from her tender eyes, in the way most fall, they grasped in the highmood of theforestieria sublimity untouched by the niceties of bargaining. A man in the state of mind to which the girl's visible shine confessed, could hardly be expected to stickle at the price of the few figs and roses which served as an easy passage from the wonder of their meeting to the ground of their accustomed gay pretences. They made of Peter's purchases of fruit and flowers a market garden of their own from which they had but just come on hopeful errands. They made believe again as boats thickened like winged things in a summer garden, to be bent upon discovery, and slid with pretended caution under the great ships stationed by the Giudecca, from which they heard sailors singing. They shot with exaggerated shivers past a slim cruiser and suddenly Miss Dassonville clutched Peter by the arm.
"Oh!" she cried: "Do you see it? That little dark, impudent-looking one, andtheflag?"
Peter saw; he was not quite, he reminded her, even in the intoxication of a morning on the lagoons with her, quite in that state where he couldn't see his country's flag when it waspointed out to him. They came alongside with long strokes, and sniffed deliciously.
"Ah—um—um——" said Miss Dassonville. "I know what that is. It's ham and eggs. How long since you've had a real American breakfast?"
"Not since I left the steamer," Peter confessed. "Now if I were to smell hot cakes I shouldn't be able to stand it. I should go aboard her."
Miss Dassonville saluted softly as they went under the bright banner.
"'Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light,'" she began to sing and immediately a large, blooming face rose through a mist of faded whisker at the prow and they saw all the coast of Maine looking down on them from the rail of theMerrythought.
"United States, ahoy?" it said.
They came close under and Miss Dassonville hailed in return; as soon as the captain saw her face smiling up at him he beamed on it as the women in the boats had done.
"We smelled your breakfast," she explained, and the man laughed delightedly.
"I know what kind these Dagoes give ye. Come up and have some."
Peter and the girl consulted with their eyes.
"Are you going to have hot cakes?" she demanded.
"I will if you come; darned if I don't."
"We're coming, then."
It was part of the task that Peter had set himself, to persevere for Savilla Dassonville the film of unconsciousness that lay delicately like the bloom of a rare fruit over all that was at that moment going on in her, that made him hasten as soon as Captain Dunham had announced himself, to introduce her particularly by name. To forestall in the jolly sailor the natural interpretation of their appearance together at this hour and occasion, he had to lend himself to the only other reasonable surmise. If they were not, as he saw it on the tip of the good captain's tongue to propose, newly married, they were in a hopeful way to be. The consciousness of himself as accessory to so delightful an arrangement passed from the captain to Peter with almost the obviousnessof a wink, as he surrendered himself to the charm of the girl's ethereal excitement.
He understood perfectly that his not being able to feel more of a drop from the pregnant mystery of her call and his high response to it, to the homely incident of breakfast, was due to Miss Dassonville's obliviousness of its being one. It was for her, in fact, no drop at all but rather as if they had pulled out for a moment into this little shoal of neighbourly interest and comfortable food, the better to look back at the perfect wonder of it, as from the deck of theMerrythoughttoward the fair front of the ducal palace and the blue domes of St. Mark's behind the rearing lion.
Although he had parted from her that morning with no hint of an arrangement for a next meeting, it had become a part of the day's performance for Peter to call for the two ladies in the afternoon, so much so that his own sense of the unusualness of finally letting the gondola go off without him, and his particular wish at this juncture not to mark his intercourse with any unusualness, led him to send off with it as many roses as Luigi could find at that seasonon the Piazza. Afterward, as he recalled that he had never sent flowers to Miss Dassonville before, and as he had that morning furnished her from the market boats past her protesting limitation, it was perhaps a greater emphasis to his desertion.
However, it seemed that the roses and nothing but the roses might serve as a bridge, delicate and dizzying, to support them from the realization of their situation, into which he had no intention of letting Miss Dassonville fall. He stayed in his room most of that afternoon, knowing that he was shut up with a very great matter, not able to feel it so because of the dryness of his heart, nor to think what was to be done about it because of the lightness of his brain.
It occurred to him at last that at St. Mark's there might be reflective silences and perhaps resolution. He felt it warm from the stored-up veneration of the world, and though he said to himself, as he climbed to the galleries, that it was to give himself the more room to think, he knew that it must have been in his mind all the time that the girl was there, as it wasnatural she should have come to the place where they had met. Even before he caught the outline of her dress against the pillar he found himself crossing over to the organ loft the better to observe her. Knowledge reached him incredibly across the empty space, as to what, over and above the pictured saints, she faced there in the vault, lit so faintly by the shining of its golden walls. The service of the benediction going on in the church below furnished him with the figure of what came to him from her as she laid up her thoughts on an altar before that mysterious intimation of maternity which presages in right women the movement of passion. He felt himself caught up in it purely above all sense of his personal insufficiency.
Back in his hotel after dinner he found he had still to let the roses answer for him as he sat out on his balcony and realized oddly that though he had no right to go to Miss Dassonville again until he had thought out to its furthermost his relation to her, he could, incontinently, think better in her company.
It was not wholly then with surprise, sincehe felt himself so much in need of some compelling touch, that he heard, after an hour of futile battling, the Princess speak to him.
She stood just beyond him in the shadow of the wistaria that went up all the front of the balcony, and called him by his name.
"Ah," said Peter "I know now who you are. You are the one who stayed."
"How did you find out?"
"Because the one who ran away was the one he would have married."
He did not look at the Princess, but he saw the shadow of her that the moon made, mixed with the lace of the wistaria leaves, tremble.
"Well," said she, "and what are you going to do about it?"
"You know then ...?"
"I was there on the water with you this morning.... It was I that showed you the way, but you had no eyes for anything."
It was the swift recurrent start of what hehadhad eyes for that kept Peter silent long enough for the Princess to have asked himagain what he was going to do about it, and then——
"The other night—with the music—she knew that I was there?"
"Oh—she!" He was taken all at once with the completeness with which in his intimate attitude to things, Savilla did know. "She knows everything."
"What was there so different about the other one?"
"Everything ... she was beautiful ... she was air and fire ... she made the earth rock under me."
"And did you go to her calling?"
"I would have risen out of death and dust at her slightest word ... I would have followed where her feet went over all the world."
"And why did you never?"
"I suppose," said Peter, "it was because she never called."
"This one," suggested the Princess, "would be prettier if she were not so thin; and she wouldn't have to wear shirtwaists if you married her. She makes them herself, you know. Why did the other one run away?"
"That's just the difficulty. I can't remember." He wished sincerely within himself that he might; it seemed it would have served him somehow with Miss Dassonville. "I've been very ill," he apologized.
"Anyway, you'd be getting what everybody wants."
"And that is——"
"A woman of your own ... understanding and care ... and children. I was in the church with you ... you saw——"
"But I don't want to talk about it."
"What do you want then?"
"To be the prince in a fairy tale, I suppose," Peter sighed.
"Oh, you're all of that toher. The half god—the unmatched wonder. When she watched your coming across the water this morning—Iknow the look that should go to a slayer of dragons. It seems to me," said the Princess severely, "it is you who are running away."
She was wise enough to leave him with that view of it though it was not by any meansleaving him more comfortable. He tried for relief to figure himself as by the Princess' suggestion, he must seem to Savilla Dassonville. But if he was really such to her why could he not then play the Deliverer in fact, rescue her from untended illness, from meagreness and waste? Why not, in short, marry her, except for a reason—oh, there was reason enough if he could only remember it!
He heard Luigi moving softly in the room behind, and presently when the door clicked he rose and went in and taking the lamp held it high over him, turning with it fronting the huge mirror in its gilded frame. If there were a good reason why he couldn't marry Savilla Dassonville, he ought to have found it in his own lean frame, the face more drawn than was justified by his years, lined about the eyes, the hand that held the accusing lamp broadened by labours that no scrupulosity of care denied. Weatheral, of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., unaccomplished, unaccustomed. He put down the lamp heavily, leaning forward in his chair as he covered his face with his hands and groaned in them, fully remembering.