He had been sitting just so in his library with the lamp behind him and the hollow flare of the coals making an excellent starting place for the House which was now so near him that the mere exhibition in shop windows of the stuffs with which it was being modernly renewed, was enough to set him off for it. It was so near now, that since the announcement of their engagement in September, he had moved through all its obligations benumbed by the white, blinding flash thrown backward from its consummating moment, the moment of her cry to him, of their welding at the core of light and harmony, bounded inevitably by the approaching date of marriage. It had been, he recalled on some one of those occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the Best Society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance at the darkened doorway as the mere extension ofhis white-heated fancy. The next moment as she charged into the circle of the lamp he saw that the umbra of some strange electrical excitement hung about her. It fairly crackled between them as he rose hurriedly to his feet.
"You have come, Eunice! You have come——"
But he saw well enough what she had come for. She laid the case on the table, but as she tugged impatiently at her glove, the fringe of her wrap caught the clasp of it and scattered the jewels on the cloth. She tried then to put the ring beside them, but her hand shook so that it fell and rolled upon the floor behind them. Peter picked it up quietly, but he did not offer it to her hand again.
"I have come," said Eunice, "to say what in my mother's house I was afraid of being interrupted in saying; what you must see, what my mother won't see."
"I see you are greatly excited about something!"
"I'm not, I'm not.... That is ... I am, but not in the way you think," she was sharp with insistence; "that is what you andmother always say, that I'm nervous or excited, and all the time you don'tsee."
"What is it I don't see, Eunice?"
"That I can't stand it, that I can't go on with it, that it is dreadful to me,—dreadful!"
"What is dreadful?"
"Everything, being engaged—being married and giving up...." It was fairly racked out of her by some inward torture to which he had not the key.
"Of course, Eunice, if you don't wish to be married so soon——" Peter was all at sea. He brought a chair for her, and perceiving that he would go on standing as long as she did, she sat upon the edge of it but kept both the arms as a measure of defence. The slight act of doing something for her restored him for the moment to reality; he bent over her. "I've never wanted to hurry you, dearest—— It shall be when you say." She put up her hands suddenly with a shivering movement.
"Oh, never, never at all; never to you!"
Peter could feel that working its track of desolation inward, but the first instinctive movement of his surface was to close over thewound. He took it as he knew he could only take it: as the explosive crisis of the virginal resistance which he remembered he had heard came to girls when marriage loomed upon them. He took a turn down the room to steady himself, praying dumbly for the right word.
"It isn't as if I didn't respect you"—she was eager in explanation, hurried and stumbling—"as if I didn't know how good you are ... it is only, because we are so different."
"How different, Eunice?"
"Oh ... older, I suppose." She grew quieter; it appeared on the whole they were getting on. "I care for so many things, you know—dancing—and bridge—youngthings—and you are always reading and reading. Oh! I couldn't stand it."
So it was out now. She was jealous of his books, a little. Well, he had been self-absorbed. It occurred to him dimly that the thing to have done if he had known a little more about women, had practised with them, was to have provoked her at this point to the tears which should have sealed the renewal of his claim to her. What he said was, very quietly:
"Of course I never meant, Eunice, that you shouldn't have everything you want."
"Oh," she seemed to have found a suffocating quality in his gentleness, against which she struck out with drowning gestures, "if you could only understand what it would mean to me never to have anybody I liked to talk to about things,—anybody I liked to be with all the time!" She was choked and aghast at the enormity of it.
"But I thought...." Peter was not able to go on with that. "Isn't there anybody you like to be with, Eunice?"
"Yes," said Eunice. "Burton Henderson."
Mutinous and bright she looked at him out of the chair with a hand on either arm of it poised for flight or defence. After an interval Peter heard his own voice out of a fog rising to the conventional utterance.
"Of course, if you have learned to love him——"
"I've loved him all the time." She was so bent on making this clear to him that she was careless what went down before her. "From the very beginning," she said, "but he had solittle money, and mother ... I promised you, I know, but it's not as if I ever said I loved you."
She should have spared him that! He had not put out a hand to hold her that he should be so pierced through with needless cruelty. But she was bent on clearing her skirts of him.
"Do you think," she expostulated to his stricken silence, "that if I'd cared in the least I'd have made it so easy for you? Can't you see that it was all arranged, that wejumpedat you?" All the time she sat opposite him, thrusting swift and hard, there was no diminution of her appealing beauty, the flaming rose of her cheeks and the soft, dark flare of her hair. As if she felt how it belied at every turn the quality of her unyielding intention, her voice railed against him feverishly. "I suppose you think I'm mercenary, and I thought I was, too. You don't know how people like usneedmoney sometimes. All the things we likecostso—all the real things. And poor mamma, she needed things; she'd never had them, and I thought that I could stand beingmarried to you if I could get them that way.... Maybe I could, you know, if you'd been different, more like us I mean. But there was such a lot you didn't understand ... things you hadn't even heard about. I found that out as soon as we were engaged. There wasn't a thing between us; not athing."
It poured scalding hot on Peter's sensitive surfaces: made sensitive by the way in which even in this hour her beauty moved him. He felt tears starting in his heart and prayed they might not come to his face. "So you see as we hadn't anything in common it would be better for us not to go on with it even"—she broke a little at this—"even if there hadn't been anybody else. You see that, don't you?" She dared him to deny it rather than begged the concession of him as she gathered herself for departure.
"I see that."
"You never really belonged to our set, you know——" She rose now and he rose blindly with her; he hoped that she was done, but there was something still. "It hasn't been easy to go through with it.... Mother isn'tgoing to make it any easier. It's natural for her to want me to have everything that money would mean, and I thought that if you would just keep away from her ... you owe something to Burton and me for what we've been through, I think ... just leave it to me to manage in my own way...."
"I shall never trouble you, Eunice."
He came close to her then to open the door, seeing that she was to leave him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the remotest implication of the situation. She found at last the barbedest. All the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for Peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places.
"It isn't as if I had ever loved you; I owe it to Mr. Henderson to remind you that I never said I did.... You know I never liked to have you kiss me."
He had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of Eunice Goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it—days when he would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his. The sharp edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his manhood. Never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and Ellen had obliged him to present to destiny. She had beggared him of all those aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept himself inwardly alive. The capacity for loving died in him with the knowledge of not being able to be loved.
Out of the anæsthesia of exhaustion from which Italy had revived him, it rolled back upon him that by just the walled imperviousnessthat shut Eunice Goodward from the appreciation of his passion, he was prevented now from Savilla Dassonville.
It was odd, then, having come to this conclusion in the middle of the night, that when he joined the ladies in the morning he should have experienced a sinking pang in not being able any longer to be sure what Miss Dassonville thought of him. There was in her manner, as she thanked him for the flowers, nothing to ruffle the surface of the bright, impersonal companionship which she had afforded him for weeks past.
The occasion which brought them together was an agreement entered into some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing forsome renewal of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that such a flight implied.
It came out a little later, perhaps, when after traversing many high and resounding marble halls, with a great many rooms opening into one another in a way that suggested rather the avoidance of privacy than its security, they found themselves in one of those gardens of shut delight of which the exteriors of Venetian houses give so little intimation.
As she went about from bough to bough of the neglected roses, turned all inward as if they took their florescence from that still lighted human passion which had found its release and centre there, her face glowed for the moment with the colour of her quick sympathies. She turned it on him with an unconscious, tender confidence, which not to meet seemed to Peter, in that gentle enclosure full of warmth and fragrance, to assume the proportions of a betrayal.
He did meet it there as she came back to him for the last look from the marble balustrade by which they had descended, coveringher hand, there resting, lingeringly with his own. He was awakened only to the implication of this movement by the discovery that she had deeply and exquisitely blushed.
It was a further singularity in view of the conviction with which Peter had come through the night, that the mood of protectingness which the girl provoked in him should have multiplied itself in pointing out to him how many ways, if he had not made up his mind not to marry her at all, such a marriage could be made to serve its primal uses. She had turned up her cuff to trail her hand overside as they slid through the lucent water, and the pretty feminine curve of it had brought to mind what the Princess had told him of the shirt-waists she made herself. He decided that she made them very well. But she was too thin for their severity—and if he married her he would have insisted on her wearing them now and then as a tender way to prevent her suspecting that it was on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though her mind hadplayed into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had been always, as regards her person, a little prim with him, had lent to their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of theMerrythoughtat the door of the Consulate. Mr.Weatheralhad some papers which Lessing had sent him to acknowledge there, and it was a piece of the morning's performance, when he had come back from that business, to find that the meeting had taken on—from some mutual discovery of the captain's and Mrs. Merrithew's of a cousin's wife's sister who had married one of the Applegates who was a Dunham on the mother's side—quite the aspect of a family party. It came in the end to the four of them going off at Peter's invitation to have lunch together in a café overhanging thecalle. He told himself afterward that he would not have done it if he had recalled in time the friendly seaman's romantic appreciation of the situation between himself and Miss Dassonville. He saw himself so intrigued by it that, by the time lunch was over, he felt himself in a position which to hisown sensitiveness, demanded that he must immediately leave Venice or propose to Miss Dassonville. To see the way he was going and to go on in it, had for him the fascination of the abyss. He caught himself in the act even of trying to fix Miss Dassonville's eye to include her by complicity in the beguilement of the captain, a business which she seemed to have undertaken on her own account on quite other grounds. He perceived with a kind of pride for her that she had the ways of elderly sea-going gentlemen by heart. It was something even if she had failed to charm Peter, that she shouldn't be found quite wanting in it by other men.
When they had put him back aboard of theMerrythoughtthey had come to such a pitch among them all, that as the captain leaned above the rail to launch an invitation, he addressed it to Miss Dassonville, as, if not quite the giver of the feast, the mistress of the situation.
"When are you coming to lunch with me?" demanded the captain.
"Never!" declared Miss Dassonville. "It would be quite out of the question to have hotcakes for luncheon, and I absolutely refuse to come for anything less."
"There's something quite as good," asserted the captain, "that I'll bet you haven't had in as long."
"Better than hot cakes?" Miss Dassonville was skeptical.
"Pie," said the captain.
"Oh,Pie!" in mock ecstasy. "Well, I'd come for pie," and with that they parted.
Peter had plenty of time for considering where he found himself that afternoon, for the ladies were bent on a shopping expedition on which they had rather pointedly given him to understand he was not expected to attend. He had tried that once, and had hit upon the excellent device, in face of the outrageous prices proposed by the dealers, of having them settle upon what they would like and sending Luigi back to bargain for it. All of which would have gone very well if Mrs. Merrithew, in the delight of his amazing success, had not gone back to the shop the next day to duplicate his purchases. Peter had never heard what occurred on that occasion, but he had noticed that they never talked in hispresence of buying anything again. Bloombury people, he should have remembered, had perfectly definite notions about having things done for them.
He walked, therefore, on this afternoon in the Public Gardens and tried to reconstruct in their original force the reasons for his not marrying Savilla Dassonville. They had come upon him overwhelmingly in the recrudescence of memory, reasons rooted very simply in his man's hunger for the lift, the dizzying eminence of desire. He liked the girl well enough but he did not want her as he had wanted Eunice Goodward, as he wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody—who was not Eunice—he was perfectly clear on this point—but should be in a measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice had forced upon him. He was there between the dark and dawn, and here again in the cool of the garden, to taste the full bitterness of the conviction that he was not good enough to be loved. He was not to be helpedfrom that by the thought, which came hurrying on the heels of the other, that Savilla Dassonville loved him. He had a moment of almost hating her as she seemed to plead with him, by no motion of her own he was obliged to confess for those raptures, leaping fires, winged rushes, which should have been his portion of their situation.
He hated her for the certainty that if he went away now quietly without saying anything, it would be to visit on her undeservedly all that had come to him from Eunice. For she would know; she would not, as he had been, be blind to the point of requiring the spoken word. If he left her now it would be to the unavoidable knowledge that, as the Princess had said of him, he would be running away. He would be running from the evidences of a moneyless, self-abnegating youth, from the plain surfaces of efficiency and womanliness, not hedged about and enfolded, but pushed to the extremity of its use. He had, however, when he had taken that in from every side, the grace to be ashamed of it.
He was ashamed, too, of finding himself attheir next meeting involved in a wordless appeal to be helped from his state to some larger grounds. If the girl had but appealed to him he could have done with a fine generosity what he felt was beyond him to invite. He could have married Savilla Dassonville to be kind to her; what he didn't enjoy was putting it on a basis of her being kind to him.
Miss Dassonville, however, afforded him no help beyond the negative one of not talking too much and taking perhaps a shade less interest in Venice. They had two quiet days together in which it was evident, whatever Peter settled with himself as to his relation to the girl, it had taken on for Mrs. Merrithew the pointedness known in Bloombury as "attentions." She paid in to the possibilities of the situation the tribute of her absence for long sessions in which, so far as Peter could discover, the situation rather fell to the ground. It began to appear that he had missed as he was doomed with women, the crucial instant, and was to come out of this as of other encounters, empty. And then quite suddenly the girl put out a hand to him.
It was along about the end of the afternoon they had come out of the church of Saint George the Greater, which as being most accessible had been left to the latter end of their explorations. Mrs. Merrithew had just sent Giuseppe back for a shawl which she had dropped in the cloister. They sat rocking in the gondola looking toward the fairy arcade of the ducal palace and the pillars of the saints, and suddenly Miss Dassonville spoke to excuse her quietness.
"I must look all I can," she said; "we are leaving the day after to-morrow."
If she had retired behind Mrs. Merrithew's comfortable breadth in order to deliver her shot the more effectively, she missed seeing how plumply it landed in the midst of Peter's defences and scattered them.
"Leaving Venice?" he said. "Leaving me?" It took a moment for that fact, dropping the depth of his indecision, to show him where he stood. "But I thought you understood," he protested, "that I wanted you to stay ... to stay with me...." He leaned across Mrs. Merrithew's broad lap in a great fear ofnot being sufficiently plain. "Make her understand," he said, "that I want her to stay always."
"I guess," said Mrs. Merrithew, a dry smile twinkling in the placidity of her countenance, "you'd better take me right home first, and then you can explain to her yourself."
"And you are sure," asked Peter, "that you are not going to mind my being so much older?"
"Oh, I'm going to mind it: There will be times when I shall be afraid of not living up to it. But the most part of my minding will be, since you are so much better acquainted with life than I am, that in any matter in which we shouldn't agree I shall be so much the more sure of your being right. It's going to be a great help to us, having something like that to go by."
"Oh," said Peter, "you put it very prettily, my dear."
He was aware as soon as he had said it, that she would have a way always of puttingthings prettily, and that not for the sake of any prettiness, but because it was so intrinsically she saw them. It would make everything much simpler that she was always sufficiently to be believed.
"It isn't, you know," she went on, "as if I should have continually to prop up my confidence with my affection as I might with a man of less experience. Oh!" she threw out her arms with a beautiful upward motion, "you give me so much room, Peter."
"Well, more than I would give you at this moment if we were not in a gondola on a public highway!"
He amazed himself at the felicity with which during the three days of their engagement he had been able to take that note with her, still more at the entertainment of her shy response. It gave him a new and enlarged perception of himself as a man acquainted with passion. All that had been withheld from him, by the mere experience of missing, he was able to bestow with largesse. The witchery and charm that had been done on him, he worked—if he were but to put his arm about her now, to draw herso that her head rested on his shoulder, with a certain pressure, he could feel all her being flower delicately to that beguilement. He had promised himself, when he had her promise, that she should never miss anything, and he had a certain male satisfaction in being able to make good. What he did now, in deference to their being as they were in the full light of day and the plying traffic, was to say:
"Then if I were to put it to you in the light of my superior experience, that I considered it best for us to be married right away, I shouldn't expect you to contradict me."
"Oh, Peter!"
"We can't keep Mrs. Merrithew on forever, you know," he suggested, "and we've such a lot to do—there's Greece and Egypt and the Holy Land——"
"But can we—be married in Venice, I mean?"
"That," said Peter, "is what I'm waiting your permission to find out."
He spent the greater part of the afternoon at that business without, however, getting satisfaction. "Marriage in Italy," the consul told him,"is a sort of world-without-end affair. Even if you cable for the necessary papers it will be a matter of a month or six weeks before the ceremony could be accomplished. You'll do better to go to Switzerland with the young lady."
For the present he went back to her with a list of the required certificates, and another item which he brought out later as a corrective for the disappointment for the first.
"My birth and baptismal certificates? I haven't any," said Miss Dassonville, "and I don't believe you have either; and I don't want to go to Switzerland."
"No," said Peter, "even that takes three weeks."
"Why can't he marry us himself—the consul, I mean? I thought wherever the flag went up was territory of the United States."
"If you will come along with me in the morning we can ask him," Peter suggested, and on the way there he loosed for her benefit the second item of his yesterday's discovery. They slid past the façade of a certain palace and she kissed the tip of her finger to it lightly. "It's as if we had a secret between us," she explained,"the secret of the garden. Besides, I shall always love it because it was there I first suspected that you—cared. When did you begin to care, Peter?"
"Since before I can remember. Would you like to live in it?"
"In this palace? Here in Venice?"
"It's for rent," he told her; "the consul has it."
"But could we afford it?"
"Well," said Peter, "if you like it so much, at the rate things are here, we can pull it up by the roots and take it back to Bloombury."
They lost themselves in absurd speculations as to the probable effect on the villagers of that, and so failed to take note as their gondola nosed into the green shadow under the consulate, of theMerrythought'slaunch athwart the landing, until the captain himself hailed them.
"This port," he declared, "is under embargo. I have been waiting here since half tide and there's nothing doing. Somebody's in there chewing red tape, but I don't calculate to let anybody else have a turn at it until I get my bit wound up an' tied in a knot. Now don't tell me you've got business in there?"
"We want to find out something."
"Well, when ye find it, it won't be what ye want," asserted the captain gloomily. "It never is in these Dago countries." He motioned his own boat aside from the landing. "If ye want to go inside and set on a chair," he suggested, "I'll not hender ye. I like the water best myself. I hope your business will stand waiting."
"To everybody but ourselves," said Peter. "You see," he caught the permission lightly from Miss Dassonville's eyes, "we want to get married."
"Ho!" said the captain, chirking up. "I could 'a' told ye that the fust time I laid eyes on ye. But I'll tell ye this: ye can't do nothing in a hurry in this country. The only place where a man can do things up as soon as he thinks of 'em is on the blue water. We don't have red tape on shipboard, I can tell you. The skipper's the law and the government."
"Could you marry people?"
"Well, I ain't to say in the habit of it, but it's the law that I could."
"Then if we get tangled up with the consul,"said Peter, "we'll have to fall back on you," and they took it as an excellent piece of fooling which they were later to come back to as a matter of serious resort.
"Of course," said the consul, "I could marry you and it would be legal if you chose to count it so at home, but if you are thinking of taking a house here and of making an extended residence I shouldn't advise it. As to Captain Dunham's suggestion, it's not wholly a bad one. Not being in Italy, the Italians can't take exception to it, and if it is properly witnessed and recorded at home it ought to stand."
They couldn't of course take it in all at once that they were simply to sail out there into the ethereal blueness and to come back from it with the right to live together. However, it made for a great unanimity of opinion as they talked it over on the way home, that, since so much was lacking from Peter's marriage that he had dreamed went to it, and so much more had come into Savilla's than she had dared to imagine, it mattered very little what else was added or left out.
"I suppose," suggested Miss Dassonville, "Mrs. Merrithew will think it dreadful." But as it turned out Mrs. Merrithew thought very well of it.
"On a United States boat with a United States minister—there is one here I've found out—it seems a lot safer than to trust to these foreign ways. If you was to be married in Italian I should never be certain you wouldn't wake up some morning and find yourself not married. And then how should I feel!" As to the palace plan, she threw herself into it with heavy alacrity. "I s'pose I've got to see you through," she said, "and it will give me something to think about. I don't suppose you have any intention that way, but an engaged couple isn't very good company."
It transpired that theMerrythoughtwould put out to the high seas on the twenty-second, and it was in the flutter of their practical adjustments to meet this date that Peter found the ten days of his engagement move so swiftly; to engage servants, to interview tradespeople, to prune the neglected garden—it was Savilla's notion that they should do this themselves—allthe stir of domestic life made so many points of advantage to support him above that dryness of despair from which he had moments of feeling himself all too hardly rescued. He had come up out of it sufficiently by the help that Italy afforded, to glimpse once more the country of his dreams, only by this act of his marriage to turn his back on it forever. Savilla Dassonville was a dear little thing; if it came to that, a revered and valued thing, but she was not, he had never pretended it, the Lovely Lady, and the door that shut them in as man and wife was to shutherforever out of his life. And yet though this was his accepted, his official position, it was remarkable even to himself how much less frequently as the preparations for his marriage went forward, he found himself obliged to fall back upon it; how much more he projected himself into his future as the adored and protecting male. He recalled in this connection that the Princess had said to him that he should visit his House no more, and it was part of the proof of the notion he entertained toward himself as a man done with the imaginative life, that he accepted it with no more fussabout it. He had in fact his mind's eye on a piece of ground which Lessing could buy for him, on the river, an hour from the city, where he could manage for Savilla at least, a generous substitute for dreams, and a situation for himself for which he began to discover more appetite than he would have believed. It was likely, he thought, that he would himself take a turn at planning the garden.
It was very early in the morning when the wedding party which had been reinforced by the consul, the mistress of Casa Frolli, and the minister, who had turned out to be exactly of Mrs. Merrithew's persuasion, went aboard theMerrythought, blooming out amazingly in bunting and roses for the occasion. The morning blueness had drained out from the city and stained the waters eastward as they put out between the red and yellow sails of the fishing fleet. They saw the cypress-towered islands of romance melt in the morning haze. The steam launch which was to take them ashore again ploughed alongside, and there was a pleasant sort of home smell from the cook's quarters.
Peter sat forward with the bride's hand tucked under his arm and presently he heard her laughing softly, delightedly.
"Peter, do you know what that is, that good smell I mean?"
"What do you think it is?"
"It's pie baking. Truly, don't you think I'm enough of a housewife to know that?"
"I know you're everything you ought to be."
"It is pie, there's no doubt about it, but we must pretend to be awfully surprised when the captain brings it out. But Peter, don't you like it?"
"Pie, my dear?"
"No, but like having everything so homey and—and—so genuine at our wedding?"
"I hope," said Peter, "it's genuine pie, but I see what you mean, my dear."
"It's an omen, almost, that we'll always have the good, comfortable, common things to fall back upon, if our marriage should not prove quite all we've dreamed it. It's been so perfect up to now; it must drop down out of the clouds some time."
It seemed rather to have taken a sweep upwardwhen, with sails swelling over them and the beat of the sea under the bows, they stood up to be married, and to exhibit capacities of sustaining itself at a level from which not the very soggy and sallow complexioned pie with the cook grinning behind it, could dislodge the two most concerned in it. It wore through the day to a contained and quiet gayety at a dinner which took place in theristorantaover the water where they had once lunched with the captain, and lasted until Peter had brought his wife home again to the refurnished palace. It had gone, as he told himself, remarkably well, with every intimation, as he had time to tell himself in his last hours in the garden with his cigar, of going much better, of becoming as the place gave him occasion to indulge the figure, an enclosed and fragrant garden, in which if no flaming angel of desire kept the gate for him, he had at least the promise of refreshment.
That old passion for Eunice Goodward, all his feelings for all the women he had known, served to show him what Savilla had meant when she said he "gave her so much room"—the renewed sense of the spaciousness of life.
It would be there for his wife at the completest, and if she had, as it seemed, turned him out of the Wonderful House in order to live in it herself, he at least kept the gates. And was not this the proper business for a man? He recalled what the Princess had said to him so long ago when he had first begun to think of himself as a bachelor. "It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass." Well, he had dreamed and he had slain some dragons. Later there would be children playing in the House, daughters perhaps ... Lovely Ladies. The world would be a better place for them to walk about in because of all that he had lost and been.
When he went into the garden he had half expected that the Princess would speak to him; the place was full of hints of her, faint and persuasive as the scent of the flowers in the dark, little riffles of his pulse, flushed surfaces, the tingling of his palms which announced her, but she did not speak. He said to himself that he was now a well man and had seen the last of her. Never before had he felt so very well.
He saw the light moving in the palace behind him as his wife moved to complete some of her arrangements; he heard her then pacing along the marble floor of the great hall which went quite through the middle of it—she must be going to her room, and in a little while he would go in to her—he heard the light tapping of her feet and then he saw her come, the lit lamp in her hand.
She had on still the white dress in which she had been married, and over it she had thrown the silver-woven scarf which had been one of his first gifts to her, and as she came the light glittered on it; it drew from the polished walls bright reflections in which, amid the gilded frames, he saw the dim old pictures start and waver—and as he saw her coming so, Peter threw away his cigar and gripped suddenly at the balustrade to steady him where he stood, against what out of some far spring of his youth rushed upon him, as he saw her come—as he had always seen her, as he knew now he was to see her always—his wife and the Lovely Lady.
The Country Life Press