“And so through all the length of days—”
“And so through all the length of days—”
“And so through all the length of days—”
Mr. Osborne did not sing: his fat fingers closed on his wife’s rings, and he listened to her. He would nothave listened then to Melba. He would not have been so completely absorbed if the seraphim had sung to him.
And then finally Dora looked at Claude. She thought she understood a little more. But she only saw a little more.
IT was about two of the afternoon in the last week of May, and this sudden heat wave which had spread southward over Europe had reached Venice, making it more than ever a place to dream and be still in and less than ever a place to see sights in. So at any rate thought its foreign visitors, for the Grand Canal even and the more populous of the waterways were empty of pleasure-seeking and church-inspecting traffic, and but little even of the mercantile or more necessary sort was on the move. Here and there a barge laden with coke and wood fuel was being punted heavily upstream, clinging as far as might be to the side of the canal, where it would feel less of the tide that was strongly setting seaward, or here another carrying the stacked-up furniture of some migratory household passed down midstream so as to get the full aid and current of the tide avoided by the other. But apart from such traffic and the passage of the gray half-empty steamers that churned and troubled the water at regular intervals, sending the wash of their slanting waves against the walls of the white palaces, and making the moored and untenanted gondolas slap the water with sudden hollow complaints, and grind their sides uneasily against the restrainingpali, there was but little stir of movement or passage. No lounger hung about on the steps of the iron bridge, and the sellers of fruit, picture postcards, and tobacco had taken theirwares into the narrow strip of shade to the north of the Accademia, and waited, unexpectant of business, till the cool of the later hours should bring theforestieriinto the street again.
Even the native population shunned the glare of the sun, and preferred, if it was necessary to go from one place to another, to seek the deep shadows of the narrow footways rather than face the heat and glare of the canals, and the boatmen in charge of the public ferries had moored their craft in the shade if possible, or, with heads sheltered beneath their discarded coats, passed the long siesta-hour with but little fear of interruption or call on their services. The domes and towers of the town glittered jewel-like against the deep blue of the sky, and their outlines trembled in the quiver of the reverberating air. On the north side of the Grand Canal the southward-facing houses dozed behind lattices closed to keep out the glare and the heat, and the air was still and noiseless but for the staccato chiding of the swallows which pursued their swift and curving ways with nothing of their speed abated. Over the horizon hung a purplish haze of heat, so that the edge of the sea melted indistinguishably into the sky, and Alps and Euganean hills alike were invisible.
Dora had lunched alone to-day, for Claude had gone to Milan to meet his father and mother, who were coming out for a fortnight and would arrive this evening; and at the present moment she was looking out from the window of hersalaon to the lower stretch of the Grand Canal, which, as her intimacy with it deepened, seemed ever to grow more inexplicably beautiful. The flatwhich they occupied was on the south side of the canal, and though no doubt it would have left the room cooler to have closed all inlet of the baked air, she preferred to have the windows open, and lean out to command a larger view of the beloved waterway. Deep into her heart had the magic of the city of waters entered, a thing incomparable and incommunicable. She only knew that when she was away from Venice the thought of it caused her to draw long breaths, which hung fluttering in her throat; that when she was in it her eyes were never satisfied with gazing or herself with being soaked in it. She loved what was splendid in it, and what was sordid, what was small and what was great, its sunshine, its shadows, its moonlight, the pleasant Italian folk, and whether she sat in the jewelled gloom of St. Mark’s or shot out with the call of her gondolier from some dark waterway into the blaze of ivory moonlight on the Grand Canal below the Rialto, or whether the odour of roasting coffee or the frying of fish came to her as she passed some littlecaffe ristorantein the maze of mean streets that lie off the Merceria, or whether she lay floating at ease in the warm sustaining water of the Lido, or watched in the church of St. Georgio the mystic wreaths of spirits and archangels assembled round the table of the Last Supper, peopling the beamed ceiling of the Upper Chamber and mingling mistlike in the smoke of the lamp with which it was lit—she knew that it was Venice, the fact of Venice, that lay like a gold thread through these magical hours, binding them together, a circle of perfect pearls.
Two threads indeed ran through them all: they weredoubly strong, for it was in Venice last autumn that she and Claude had passed three weeks of honeymoon and with the glory of the place was mingled the glory of her lover. It was that perhaps that gave to details and such sights and sounds as were not remarkable in themselves their ineffaceable character. It was because she and Claude had wandered, pleased to find themselves momentarily lost, in the high-eaved labyrinths of narrow streets, that the dingy little interiors, thetrattoriaswith their smell of spilt wine, and their vine-leaf-stoppered bottles, their sharp savour of cooking and sawdust-sprinkled floors were things apart from anything that could be seen or perceived in any other town in the world. A spire of valerian sprouted from mouldering brickwork, the reflection of a marble lion’s head on snow-white cornice quivered in the gray-green water below, little sideway-scuttling crabs bustled over the gray mud of the lagoons, bent on private and oblique errands of their own, seagulls hovered at the edge of the retiring water; gray-stemmedpaliwith black heads leaned together, marking the devious course of deep-dug channels; there came a cry of “Stali” and a gondola with high-arching neck (some beautiful black swan) shot out of a canal by the bridge where they lingered, and these sights and sounds, trivial in themselves, were stamped in her mind with the royal mint-mark that belonged to those weeks when she and Claude were in Venice after their marriage. Her emotion had streamed from her, soaking them with it: they were part of Venice, part of herself, and so wholly hers.
Some seal had been set on those things then that couldnever be melted out. It was Claude who had set it there, and he had so imprinted that seal upon Venice that to her now all that was Venice had the memory of her honeymoon upon it like a hallmark on silver. That time had been a score of divine days, luminous with the southern sun, warm with stillness or clement wind, and yet made vigorous with the youth and freshness of the immortal sea. And here, six months afterward, she had returned with Claude to spend a month of late May and early June before the weeks of London. In the autumn she had come home under the enchantment and by way of a neat Christmas present Mr. Osborne had prospectively given her the rent, the journey, the expenses of food and wine, the servants and their journeys and their wages of a month, “or call it five weeks, my dear, and you won’t find me pulling you up short,” he had said, “of that house on the Grand Canal that took your fancy, Palazzo —— but there, I’ve no head for foreign names. You leave London, you do, with your maid and your cook, and your housemaid and what not, and don’t forget Claude, hey? or he’ll be quarrelling with you, and me taking his side too, though its only my fun. And you take a few English servants with you, as you can fall back upon, and you send me in a bill for all the tickets and the wages, and your living bills, and your gondolas, and that’s my Christmas present to you. Don’t you bother, but make yourself comfortable. You go as you please, as we used to say, for a month, or call it five weeks, and enjoy yourself, and let me know how much it’s all stood you in. I shouldn’t wonder if Mrs. O. and I didn’t come and join you, oh, not to make you uncomfortable,no fear, but to take another piazza, ah, palazzo you call it, and have a look at the Italians, and see what’s to be seen.”
Dora had an excellent aural memory, and as she sat at her window to-day, watching the flickering reflection in the water of the sunstruck houses opposite, she could almost hear Mr. Osborne’s voice saying these hospitable and free-handed things. But they did not get between her and her memory of the weeks in October. She was aware that during the last six months she had seen things differently to the way in which they were presented to her during those weeks, but it was not Venice that had altered. It was still Venice “as per last October,” as her father-in-law might have said.
They had rowed out to Malamocco one day, and another they had gone to Torcello, the ancient mother of Venice, and she had found there a sort of tenderness for the earlier and now ruined and fevered town, just as—just as she found a tenderness for her husband’s mother. Torcello was the beginning of the magic, from Torcello the creation of what she so loved had come. On another day they had taken dinner out on to the great lagoon, had tied up to a clump of hoary gray-headedpali, notching theferroof their gondola into the disc of the setting sun. Then some tide had slowly swung them a little sideways, so that they still faced toward the brightness of the West, long after the sun had gone, and the glory of its departing had been infused into and flooded the heavens. A great cumulus cloud reared itself out of the western horizon, in tower and pinnacle of ineffable rose, with transparent aqueous blue dwellingin the folds of it and at the base of it lay the campaniles and roofs of Venice. And Claude had been beside her, he whose beauty intoxicated her, so that she interpreted all he said or did through the medium of that. He had often yawned at things that engrossed her, he had often felt that long lingering before certain pictures was tedious, but his reason for it had ever been the same, and the reason was an intoxicating one. Then pictures and campaniles absorbed her, and in consequence he, so he complained, got the less of her. “Put me down in Clapham Junction,” he had said once, “and if I find you there I shan’t ask for Venice. Tintoret. Yes, No. 20 is by Tintoret. How did you guess? I see no label on the frame: they should have them all labelled. What a handsome frame!”
On another day, the only one on which the halcyon weather had played them a trick, they had gone out in the morning to Burano, rowing at full tide over the shadows and water of oily calm, with above them a sky that was turquoise, but for a few pale combed wisps of cloud. Northward it had been very clear, and the white range of snow mountains so sharp cut that it seemed that even on an autumn day they could row across and ascend those cliffs of white. Then—Claude had noticed it first—a great tattered edge of gray vapour streamed southward off the Alps, and spread with the swiftness of spilt water along the floor, in pool and promontory of vapour over the northern heavens. He and she had been talking Italian in ridiculous fashion to their head gondolier, and now Claude pointed dramatically northward and said, “Curioso cloudo.” On which all the gaiety andlaziness of that child of the south vanished, and he and hispoppeput the boat about and rowed top speed for Venice. They had come in expectation of fine weather, with nofelse, but before they were halfway home a squall of prodigious wind and blinding rain struck them, and for an hour she and Claude nestled close beneath one mackintosh, hearing the squeal of the wind, the buffet of the rain, and by degrees the gradual rising of waves. They made a bolt for it across the last open water between San Michele and Venice, narrowly escaping being swamped.
Somehow to Dora now, that seemed the best of all the days. The gondola was three inches deep in savage spray-blown water. She knew there was danger of some sort abroad, when they had already started, and had gone too far in the maniac wind that descended on them to get back, but crouching beneath the one mackintosh with Claude, with the rain streaming in from a hundred points, and with the danger of capsize imminent, she found a glory and triumph in the moment, which, indeed, was independent, or almost so, of Venice, and was pure Claude. He had lit a cigarette, after succeeding in striking a match with infinite trouble, saying, “Now for the last smoke this side the grave,” and Dora found a sublimity of sangfroid in this remark. But at that time all he said or did was golden: he gilded all things for her.
In those days she was incapable of criticism with regard to anything that concerned him, for to her, lover of beauty as she was, his beauty, which now was a possession of hers, was a thing of dazzling and blinding quality.It blinded her still, but it must be supposed that the enthrallment of it was quite absolute no longer, since now, at any rate, she knew it was that which had taken the very command and control of herself out of her hands. She was in love with him, that was perfectly true, but it was with his beauty (an inextricable part of him) that she was in love. And now, to-day, as she leaned out of her window over the summer stillness, she found that she was beginning to be able to look undazzled at him, to see the qualities and nature of her husband as they were themselves, not as they had appeared to her in the early months of her marriage, when she could not see him at all except through the enchanted haze which surrounded him. Before she married him she had been able to do as she did to-day, to know that at times something (trivial it always was, as when he spoke of some woman as a “handsome lady”) made her check suddenly. But when they were married, when he and his wonderful beauty were hers, and she was his, that power of criticism had altogether left her, and it was only with a sort of incredulous wonder that she could remember that she had ever been capable of it. To-day, now that he was absent, for she had not seen him for over twenty-four hours, she for the first time consciously registered the fact that the power of judgment and criticism as regards him had come back to her.
Dora drew herself in from her leaning out of the window, and settled herself in a chair. This discovery rather startled her. Insignificant as it might sound, if she had described it to May Franklin or some other friend, it seemed to herself to be indicative of some essential andradical change in her relation to her husband. And it concerned itself not with the present only and with the future, but reached back into the past, so that a hundred little scenes and memories bore a different aspect to her now from that which they had hitherto borne. It had been enchanting to her, for instance, that he had said he would as soon be at Clapham Junction as at Venice, provided she was with him. At the time she had only thrilled with ecstatic wonder that she could be so much to him: now she made the comment that he did not really care for Venice. That was a pity; it was a defect in him, that he was indifferent to the exquisite beauties with which he was surrounded. She had not seen that before. It made him, so to speak, have no part in her Venice, which, strangely enough, he had created for her. It was as if a father disowned, did not recognize his own child.
Dora had no desire to pursue this train of thought, for there was something vaguely uncomfortable at the back of it at which she did not wish to look closer. So she mentally brushed it aside, and, a thing that was a daily if not an hourly habit of hers, took her mind back to the first days in which they had been together, and let it float her slowly down the enchanted weeks that had followed till it landed her at the present day again. Such retrospect had, indeed, passed out of the range of voluntary thought: it was like the pillow on which her mind, when at rest, instinctively reposed itself. After Venice they had wandered a week or two longer in North Italy, until toward the end of October a foretaste of winter caught them on the Italian lakes, and they had started for home,arriving there at the beginning of November. They had but passed through London, spending a couple of days at Claude’s little flat in Mount Street, and had then gone down to Grote for the first big pheasant shoot of the year. She found both her mother and Austell there.
Dora was essentially appreciative of all the delightful things in life which can only be obtained by abundant money, and hitherto very few of these had been within her reach. True, she was sensible enough to enjoy pictures that were not hers, to look at beautiful things exposed for the public in museums and art collections; but she did not belong to that slightly unreal class of enthusiasts who say that as long as they are able to see fine pictures and fine statues they get from them all the pleasure which such things are capable of giving. Nor again was she deficient in her appreciation of comfort, and she knew that it was infinitely nicer to telephone from the flat at Mount Street, as they had done on the two evenings they were there, and get a box at the theatre, than getting seats at the back of the dress circle, or, if times were exceptionally bad, having an egg with her tea and taking her humble place in thequeuefor the pit. She was humorist enough and of a sufficiently observant type to find entertainment of a kind while waiting in thequeue, but it seemed to her insincere to say that you preferred going to a theatre in such mode. Similarly, though you had such a beautiful view and got so much air on the top of a motor bus that such a mode of progression along the London streets was quite enjoyable, it was really far more enjoyable to have your own motor, though your outlook was not from so elevated a perch and therewas probably not quite so much air. And she was perfectly aware that she took the keenest pleasure in all the ease and comfort with which she had been surrounded since her engagement. Pierre Loti, as she had once quoted to May Franklin, had said that it was exquisite to be poor, but for herself she found it (having had long experience of poverty) much more exquisite to be rich. But there were things about that shooting week, in spite of her newly awakened love and her newly found opulence, which was in such resounding evidence there, which gave her bad moments: moments when she was between bitterness and laughter, nearer perhaps to laughter than the other, but to laughter in which bitterness would have found the reflection, at any rate, of itself.
A rather ponderous plan, evolved by the geniality and kindness of her father-in-law, underlay that week. He had been in London for the inside of one of the days that she and Claude had stopped in town after their return from Venice,en routefor Grote, and had lunched with her. Claude had been out: Uncle Alf had sent for him—rather peremptorily, so it seemed to Dora—to come down to Richmond, and since Uncle Alf was purseholder for them both, and had intimated that he wished to see him on matters connected with the purse, the invitation had the authority of a command. Consequently she and Mr. Osborne lunched alone.
“And you look rarely, my dear,” her father-in-law had said, giving her a loud smacking kiss. “Claude seems to agree with you, bless his heart and yours, for there is nothing like being married, is there, when all’s said and done, provided you find him as your heart pointsout to you? And you’ll give old Dad a bit of lunch, and leave to smoke his cigar with you afterward, and tell him about Venice. My dear, I’ve looked forward to your return with that boy of mine, so as never was, and I’m blessed if I don’t believe Mrs. O. wouldn’t be jealous of you if it wasn’t that you were his wife. But she thinks nought’s too good for Claude, even if it’s you. She says I run on about you like a clock that won’t stop striking! and I dare say she’s in the right of it.”
It was not very easy to “tell” Mr. Osborne about Venice, because it was hard to think of any common ground on which he and Venice might conceivably meet and appreciate each other, but the description seemed to satisfy him, for it was largely “Claude and I.” And what satisfied him even more was the evident happiness of the girl: she was in love with life, with love and with Claude and with beautiful things. Claude he had given her, beautiful things he could give her, and he asked if it was possible to pick up a Tintoret or two. Then came the plan, unfolded to her with almost boisterous enjoyment.
“Mrs. O. and I have put our heads together,” he said, “and I’m her ambassador, accredited, don’t they say? by her, and with authority to put propositions before you. Well, it’s just this: when that dear boy and you come down to Grote to-morrow, we want you to be master and mistress of the house, and Mrs. O. and me and Per and all the rest of them to be your guests. It’ll be for you to say what time we breakfast, and to see cook, and Claude will arrange the shoots, and give us a glass of wine after dinner if he thinks it won’t hurt us, and it’ll be foundit won’t, if he sticks to the cellar as I’ve laid down for myself and of which I’ll give him the key. It’ll give you a sort of lesson, like, my dear, as to how to make your guests comfortable, as I’ll be bound you will.”
It required no gifts of perception whatever to be able to appreciate the kindness and affection of that speech, and Dora did them full justice. At the same time she could not help being conscious of many little jerks. She remembered also the party there had been at Grote shortly after her engagement, wondered if the same sort of gathering would be assembling again, and tried to think of herself as hostess to Mrs. Price, Lady Ewart, and Mrs. Per. They were really very terrible people, and on this occasion of her home-coming with Claude it was beyond all question that the badinage would be of the most superlative order. She remembered with fatal distinctness how her mother-in-law had alluded to Mrs. Per, before Dora met her, as very superior, and it seemed to her that no long and conscientious analysis of character could have arrived at a report so definitely and completely true as was the verdict conveyed by those two words. Yet she had married Claude, she loved Claude: to accept the burden of this honour was clearly one of the obligations entailed upon her, for it was Mr. Osborne’s wish, his very kindly wish, backed and originated by his wife, and there was no shadow of excuse to shelter under for declining it. So her pause before replying was not greater than could be well filled by the smile with which she greeted the proposal.
“Ah, but how dear of you,” she said cordially, “but we shall make all kinds of mistakes. Are you sure youand Mrs. Osborne are willing to risk our making a hash of your party? I shall probably forget most things, and Claude will complete it by forgetting the remainder.”
Mr. Osborne laughed.
“My dear, you fill my plate with that hash, and I’ll ask for more,” he said. “I’ll send up my plate twice for that hash, hey? That’s capital, and it will give Mrs. O. a bit of a rest, for she’s a little overdone. Indeed, I was thinking of putting off the party, but she wouldn’t hear of it. And there’s another thing, my dear. Couldn’t you manage to call me ‘Dad,’ as the boys do? It isn’t in nature that you should call Claude’s father Mr. Osborne. I know it’s a favour to ask, like, but you and me hit it off from the first, didn’t we? You was the right wife for Claude, and no mistake.”
That met with a far more spontaneous response from Dora. There was affection, kindness, as always, in what he said, but there was more than that now—namely, a pathos of a very touching kind, in his making a favour of so simple a request. Dora was ashamed of not having complied with it before it was asked.
“Why, of course,” she said. “Dad, Dad, doesn’t it come naturally? And if you talk such nonsense, Dad, about its being a favour, I shall—I shall call Claude Mr. Osborne Junior.”
He patted her hand gently.
“Thank you, my dear, thank you,” he said. “Mrs. Per calls me Mr. Osborne, as you’ve often heard, and I don’t know that with her somehow that I want her to call me different. But I know with people like you, born in another rank of life, that’s not the custom. You makepet names and what not, not that I ask that. But I should feel it as a favour, my dear, I should indeed, if you felt you could manage to say ‘Dad’ like the boys do.”
Dora held up a reproachful forefinger.
“Now, I warn you, Dad,” she said. “In one moment Claude shall be called what I said he should be.”
“Then not a word more about it. Well, give my love to that rascal who’s got so much more than he deserves, bless him, and we expect you both to-morrow. Gone to see Uncle Alf, has he? Poor old Alf: a mass of lumbago he was when I saw him two days ago. And acid? I should scarce have thought that anyone could have felt so unkind. And a beautiful day it was, too, with the sun shining, and all nature, as you may say, rejoicing—all but poor old Alf, God bless him. But Claude always does him more good than a quart of liniment, or embrocation either, though what he spends on doctors’ stuff is beyond all telling.”
Such was Mr. Osborne’s plan, and, as has been said, the accomplishment of it gave Dora some rather bad moments. The party was terrifically ill-assorted: Lady Ewart, Mrs. Price, and one or two more like them and their husbands, being balanced against her mother and Austell, the Hungarian ambassador and his wife, and several others of that particular world in which both Mr. and Mrs. Osborne so much wished to be at home. Dora, in consequence, was positively tossed and gored by unremitting dilemma. She was obliged to make herself what she would have called both cheap and vulgar in order to convey at all to the Prices and Ewarts that particular pitch of cordiality to which they wereaccustomed. Alderman Price, for instance, habitually declined a second helping, not because he did not want (and intend) to have it, but because good manners made him say “No” the first time and “Yes” the second. As for asking for more, as Austell did, he would not have considered that any kind of behaviour. He was used to be pressed or “tempted,” and Dora had to press and tempt him—a thing which, though she would have been delighted if he had eaten a whole haunch of venison, she found difficult to do naturally. You had to call the footman back (Mrs. Osborne did it quite easily), and get him to put Mr. Price’s plate aside, and wait till he had given the affair a second thought. Then he said, “Well, I don’t know as if——” and the matter was brought to a triumphant conclusion. Yet it was not easy to manage if the procedure was new to you. Or, again, his wife particularly liked a glass of port after dinner, which after all was a completely innocent desire, but her gentility was such that she would never have thought of accepting it when it was casually offered her, but every night it had to be accepted in order to oblige Dora. Mrs. Osborne, before giving up the reins of government to her daughter-in-law, had imparted this diplomatic instruction, and Dora had been subsequently assured that her pressing and tempting was held to be the perfection of hospitality.
The flow of badinage, too, that went on incessantly from morning till night, and was almost exclusively matrimonial in character, was difficult to live up to, for whatever she or Claude did was construed by Mr. Osborne or Sir Thomas (with whom Dora, so she wasassured by Lady Ewart, had become a favourite) into having some connubial bearing. If, as happened one day, Claude drove Mrs. Price home from the shooting, Lady Ewart, with an inflamed and delighted countenance, told Dora that she wouldn’t wonder if they lost their way, and said the motor had broken down, to explain their coming in late. Or again Dora was pompously asked by Sir Thomas, on a morning of streaming wet, when no shooting was possible, to have a game of billiards, and accepting this proposal was expected to be immensely amused by the suggestion that Claude would be found hiding in the window seat, to hear what went on. The joke was all-embracing; if she spoke to Claude somebody wondered (audibly) what she was saying; if she spoke to anyone else, it was, again audibly, imagined that Claude was looking jealous. And if, for the moment, she did not speak to anybody, wonder was expressed as to what was on her mind.
All this was trivial enough in itself, and, as she well knew, oceans and continents of kindliness lay behind it. Her guests—this section of them at any rate—were pleased and well entertained as far as her part was concerned, and were charmed with her. But during all those seven stricken days—for the party was of the most hospitable order, and embraced a complete week—she had to nail a brave face, so to speak, over her own, and set her teeth inside the smiling mouth. The Prices and the Ewarts had come here to enjoy themselves, and clearly they did. But there was a certain thick-skinned robustness which was necessary to anyone who had to enter into the spirit of their enjoyment. Had the partyconsisted entirely of Ewarts and Prices and “Pers,” Dora would have found her own conduct an affair of infinitely less difficulty. As it was, her mother and Austell were there, and some six or seven more of her own world who looked on with faint smiles at such times as humour was particularly abundant, and, to do the barest justice to it, it must be said that it seemed unfailingly ubiquitous. One night Sir Thomas had taken Madame Kodjek, the wife of the Hungarian ambassador, into dinner, and in an unusual pause in the conversation Dora had heard her say in her faint silvery voice: “How very amusing, Sir Thomas. What fun you must have in Sheffield.” Then she turned her back on him, put a barrier of a white elbow on the table between him and her, and talked to Dora herself, three places off, for the rest of dinner—a thing which, as Sir Thomas’s indignant face silently testified, was conduct to which he was unaccustomed. Clearly such breach of ordinary manners was a thing unheard of in Sheffield. Dora, halfway between giggles and despair at the incident, had not, though longing to know, the heart to ask Mimi afterward what was the particular incident that made her conclude that life in Sheffield was so humorous an affair; but Sir Thomas had confided in his favourite that he thought the Baroness a very haughty lady and without any sense of what was due “to the gentleman who took you in to dinner.”
It had been difficult, therefore, to steer a course, and, as in the case of those wandering channels in the lagoons, there were here no friendly groups ofpalito guide her. She had to guess her way, turn her helm swiftly this wayand that, to avoid running aground. Had she not been Dora Osborne she would, if she had found herself in a house party of this description, have had entrancing bedroom talks to Mimi and others about Sir Thomas and the Ewarts, and—the Osbornes. Such talks would not have been unkindly; she would have seen, even as she saw now, that all manner of excellent qualities underlay the irredeemable vulgarity, and, a thing more difficult in her present position, she would have seen the humorous side of affairs. But, as it was, she could not have any bedroom talks at all of this description. Indeed, Mimi and others pointedly avoided, as they were bound to do, any mention of these other guests from the amiable desire not to say things that would embarrass her. Dora had married an Osborne, and by that act had joined another circle. True, she had not in the least left her own, but she had taken on, by necessity, the relations and friends of her husband. Indeed, looking at the transaction as a whole, there was not one of her friends who did not think she had done right, and few who did not a little envy her. There were some slight inconveniences in marrying into such a family, but they weighed very light indeed if balanced against the consequent advantages, and it was the business of her friends to minimize these disadvantages for her, pretend that Sir Thomas made no particular impression on them, and be deaf to Dora’s insidiousness in getting Mrs. Price to have her glass of port. And the advantages were so great: she had gained superabundant wealth in exchange for crippling poverty, the Osbornes’ house was now one to which everybody of any sense, and many of no sense,went, if they were so fortunate as to be asked, and, above all, she had married that charming and quiet Adonis of a husband, who looked anyhow leagues away from and above his effusive parents.
And Claude? During all this week Dora had been filled with an almost ecstatic admiration of him. He took the place corresponding to that which she herself so difficultly occupied, with perfect ease and success, and without apparent effort. To Mrs. Price’s most outrageous sallies he found a reply that convulsed her with laughter, or made her, as the case might be, call him a “naughty man,” and the thing seemed to be no trouble to him. And for the time, anyhow, such replies gave her no jerks, or, if they did, they were jerks of relief. “I shall warn Sir Thomas, Lady Ewart,” he would say, “and you will find yourself watched,” and without pause or hint of discomfiture continue a Bach conversation with Madame Kodjek.
Dora had set herself with a heartfelt enthusiasm to study and find out the secret of this wonderful performance, and she came to the conclusion that it was consummate tact grafted on to a nature as kindly as his father’s or mother’s that produced this perfect flower of behaviour. And the tact—a rare phenomenon rather, for tact implies the tactician, the pleasant schemer—was apparently unconscious. At least if it was conscious, it was Claude’s delightful modesty that disclaimed the knowledge of it. One evening she had a word with him about it.
“Darling, I don’t know how you manage,” she said, “and oh, Claude, I wish you would teach me. Everyone’s delighted with you, and you do it all so easily. How can you flirt—yes, darling, flirt—with Mrs. Price one moment and without transition talk to Mimi on the other side?”
“Oh, the Price woman isn’t so bad,” said he. “She’s a kind old soul really, and if you chaff her a bit she asks no more.”
He had come in to see her before going down to the smoking room again, where the best cigars in England were, so to speak, on tap, and where Per and Sir Thomas, between the cigars, a little brandy and soda, and the recollections of their prowess among the pheasants during the day, always sat up late. In Mr. Osborne’s house it was one of the rules of honour that the host should express a wish to sit up later than any of his guests, or wait at any rate till they all had yawned before proposing retirement, and Claude, after this cheerful remark about Mrs. Price, turned to leave the room again. Dora knew what was expected of him and suddenly rebelled.
“Surely you can leave them to drink and smoke and turn out the lights,” she said. “Do stop and talk to me. I have sent Hendon away, and who is to brush my hair? Besides, I want to talk. I’ve got better right to talk to you than Sir Thomas has. Oh, Claude, teach me: you are yourself all the time, and yet you can say things to Mrs. Price, which, if it wasn’t you——”
Dora broke off. He had unpinned the tiara, which was one of his father’s many wedding gifts to her, and which she wore, knowing it was a ludicrous thing to do in the country, because it pleased him, and nextmoment her hair, unpinned also by a movement or two of his deft fingers, fell in cataracts round her face.
“I don’t see the trouble,” he said. “Lady Ewart isn’t your sort, darling, but it’s you who are so clever. It’s you who manage so well, not me. Why, she said only to-day that she was quite jealous of you, for Sir Thomas thought such a lot of you, though of course that was only her chaff. And they say he’ll be in the running for a peerage at the next birthday honours.”
For the moment Dora was silent; simply she could not speak. She saw in the looking glass in front of her, looking over his shoulder, that face which to her was the most beautiful thing in the world, and simultaneously she heard what that beautiful mouth said. For that instant her mind was divided: it could not choose between beauty and the hopelessness of what was said. As if anybody cared who was made a peer, or as if a peerage conferred not only nobility but a single ounce of breeding! As if a problematic Lord Ewart could be for that reason even a shade more tolerable than a Sir Thomas of the same name! What could it matter, except to guards and railway porters who might count on a rather larger tip? And then the greater potency of her lover’s face absorbed her, and she lifted up her hands and drew it down to her. “Ah, well, what does it all matter?” she said, “so long as there’s you and me? But go down, dear, if you think you had better, and be sure to yawn a great deal, so that they won’t sit up very late.”
But after he had gone she wondered whether she guessed the reason why Claude made himself appropriate so easily to Lady Ewart and Mrs. Price. Was it simplybecause he found no difficulty in doing so? Was not his cleverness, his tact, shown rather in the fact that he could talk to Mimi appropriately? And it was at that moment, as she remembered now, that a certain trouble, vague and distant as yet, and couched in the innermost recesses and darkness of her mind, began to stir. She scarcely then knew what it was: she knew only that there was veiled trouble somewhere.
After this week of the shooting party, she and Claude had returned to town, still occupying the flat in Mount Street, where they remained till Christmas, with week-ends in the country. Most of these had been passed at the houses of Dora’s friends, and it could not but please and gratify her to find how Claude was welcomed and liked, so that, if at Grote there had been trouble astir, it was still again. He did all the usual things better than the average: he shot well, he played golf excellently, he was a quiet and reliable partner at bridge, he talked pleasantly, always got up when a woman entered the room, and always opened the door for her to leave it. Such accomplishments did not, it is true, reach down very far below the surface, but a young man, if he happens to be quite exceptionally good-looking and has such things at his fingers’ ends, will generally be a welcome guest. Dora had never actually wanted comforting with regard to him, but it pleased her to see that he took his place easily and naturally. For the rest, he was busy enough, for in view of the next general election he was nursing a suburban constituency, which promised well. He spoke with fluency and good sense, he was making an excellent impression in public, and he earned a considerable personal popularity in the domestic circles of his voters. And in this connection Dora had another uncomfortable moment.
As was frankly admitted between them, she could help him a good deal here, and she often went down with him and made innumerable calls at West Brentworth on miles of detached and semi-detached villas. It was an advantage beyond doubt, in this sort of place, that Claude had married a girl of “title,” and Lady Dora Osborne, or, as she was more generally addressed, Lady Osborne, charmed a large section of constituents not only because she was delightful, but because her brother was the Earl and her mother the Countess. There was no use in denying or failing to make the most of this adventitious advantage, and Dora made the most of it by being completely natural, and entering with zest into the questions of board-wages and the iniquities of tweenies. She could do that with knowledge and experience to back her, since such minutiæ had formed a very real part of her life up to the time of her marriage, and her mother was an adept in getting the most out of those who were so fortunate as to be the recipients of the somewhat exiguous wages. She could speak about beer money and the use of coals when the household was on board-wages with point and accuracy, and it charmed West Brentworth to find that Lady Osborne was not “too high” to take interest in such matters. At other houses, however, there reigned a more aristocratic tone: there would be a peerage and a copy of theWorldon the table, and a marked unconsciousness of the existence of anybody who was not a baronet. There the parties forNewmarket were discussed, and Mrs. Sandford, pouring out tea, and “tempting” Lady Osborne to a second cup, would say that the whole world seemed to have been in town lately, and was Lady Osborne dining at the Carlton two nights ago when so many distinguished people were there?
Upon which would ensue a very enlightened conversation. Mrs. Sandford knew quite well that the Earl of Wendover was Dora’s first cousin, and the Viscount Bramley her second cousin (for that came out of the peerage) and what a beautiful terrace there was at Bramley (for that came out ofCountry Life).
Then—and this was the uncomfortable moment—she and Claude got into their motor, having made the last call, and started for town. Claude said, “What a superior woman Mrs. Sandford seems to be.”
All these things, and others of which these were typical, Dora thought over as she sat in the window of hersalalooking over the Grand Canal on that baking afternoon in June when Claude had gone to Milan to meet his father and mother. They were all trivial enough, each at any rate was trivial; but to-day she wondered whether there was an addition sum to be done with regard to them. Each, if she took them singly, might be disregarded, just as half-pennies have no official status on cheques and are not treated seriously. But did they add up to something, to something that could not be disregarded?
She did not know, and, very wisely, forebore to conjecture. Besides, the gross heat of the day was subsiding, and a little breeze had begun to stir; below thewindow Giovanni had already finished the toilet of the gondola, and was putting in the tea basket, since she had said she would have tea out on the lagoon. Venice called to her, beckoned her away from thoughts where something sombre or agitating might lie concealed, into the sunlight and splendour of the day.
MR. AND MRS. OSBORNE, as has been mentioned, had no idea of planting themselves on Dora and her husband in their visit to Venice, and since the visit was to be thoroughly Bohemian in character, and they hoped and expected to rough it, it had seemed to them equally unsuitable to go to an hotel, where no doubt mediævalism would have been supplanted by modern conveniences. They both wanted, with that inexpressible elasticity and love of experience which was characteristic of them, to “behave native fashion and do like the Venetians,” as Mrs. Osborne put it, and indeed the phrase pleased her husband no less than herself. So they had taken the Palazzo Dandoli for a fortnight, at a prodigious weekly rent, which included, however, the wages of the servants and the use of the gondolas. With a view to roughing it thoroughly, Mrs. Osborne had only brought her maid with her, and her husband was completely unattended. It was to be a jaunt, a wedding trip, a renewal of old times. Probably there would be little to eat and drink, and heaven only knew what kind of a bed to sleep in, while an Italian manservant would probably not know how to fold trousers. But all these possible inconveniences were part of behaving “native-fashion,” and were not only to be expected but welcomed as being part of the genuine article.
The house stood on the eastern outskirts of Venice,with a garden facing San Michele and the lagoon, and here Dora strolled with her father-in-law on the morning after their arrival, waiting for the appearance of Mrs. Osborne, who, since they had arrived late the night before, was taking it easy, and was not expected down till lunch time at half-past twelve. Dora knew the owner of the place and had been there before, but never in these early days of summer, while yet the gardens were unscorched and the magic of spring had woven its ultimate spell. All the past was redolent in the walls of mellowed brick, the niches empty for the most part, save where a bust or two of stained Carrara marble still lingered, in the gray of the ivy-hung fountain, in the grilles of curving ironwork that gave view across the lagoon to the cypresses of San Michele, and, farther away, the dim tower of Torcello. Long alleys of cut and squared hornbeam, with hop-like flowers, led like green church aisles down the garden, and spaces of grass between them were hedged in by more compact walls of yew and privet, with its pale spires of blossom faintly sweet. Round the fountain stood three serge-coated sentinels of cypress, encrusted over with their nut-like fruits, and, flame-like against their sombre foliage, were azaleas in bright green tubs, and the swooning whiteness of orange blossom. Elsewhere, the formality of the cut hornbeam alleys and clipped hedges gave place to a gayer and more sunny quarter, though even there Italy lingered in the pavement of red and white stone that led between the more English-looking flower beds. Peach trees, in foam of pink flower, and white waterfalls of spiræa were background here; in front of them stood rows of stiff fox-gloves andin front again a riot of phlox and columbine and snapdragon covered the beds to the edge of the path. To the left lay the rose garden, approached by a walk of tall Madonna lilies, already growing fat-budded, and prepared to receive the torch of flower-life from the roses, when their part in the race should be done, and homely pansies, with quaint, trustful faces, made a velvet-like diaper of deeper colour. Here, too, stood another fountain that from leaden pipe shed freshness on the basin below, where clumps of Japanese iris were already beginning to unfold their great butterfly flowers, imperial in purple or virginal in white, and over the green marble edge of it quick lizards flicked and vanished.
Dora had arrived at the palazzo while yet the morning was young and dewy, and, leaving word that she had come, passed through the white shady courtyard of the house and down the long alleys of the garden to look out on the lagoon from the far end of it. The tide was high and the cool water shimmered over the flats that an hour or two ago were still exposed and lay in expanse of glistening ooze, or green with fields of brilliant seaweeds. But the red-sailed fishing boats had to pass between the rows ofpalithat marked the channels, and a little company of them were even now going seaward. The wind blew gently from the north, tempering the heat, and to the north were visible the remote summits of snow-clad Alps. Just opposite were the orange walls and black cypresses of San Michele, but in the gaiety of the gay day even those associations were gladdened. It was good to be anything in Venice, even to be dead, and resting there in sound of the whispering lagoon.
Then came the interruption she had waited for: her name was jovially called, and down the pergola of vines which led to the grille, between the clumps of syringa and riot of rambler, came Mr. Osborne.
He had left England with the intention of roughing it and enjoying the experience, and was clad in the way that had seemed to him appropriate. He wore a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, below which his short fat calves looked like turned oak posts clad in thick worsted and set in strong brown boots. On his head he wore a felt hat with a puggaree attached to it, and round his shoulders was a strap that carried a large binocular glass. In a word, he appeared like a man deerstalking in the tropics. Like this he was equal to any foreigneering vicissitudes and provided against all accidents that might happen in a town where, instead of walking from one place to another, you went in a black sort of punt with a strange battleaxe at the prow.
“Well, dearie, and here we are,” he said, “and pleased we are to be here, I do assure you. Passed a comfortable night, too, and so I warrant you has Mrs. O., for she was asleep still when I came downstairs. But, my dear, they’ve got but a paltry notion of furnishing these rooms. We had supper last night when we got in, in a great room as big as the hall at Grote, and nothing there but a table and a few chairs and some painted canvas on the walls, and on the floor a rug or two as you could scarcely get both feet upon. However, we were hungry, and the food was good enough. Macaroni they gave us, and a bit of veal and some cheese and strawberries. And this seems a pretty bit of garden, where Mrs. O.can sit and be cool if she finds the heat oppressive. And it’s good to see you, my dear, and blooming you look.”
He gave her a loud, kind kiss, and continued to pour forth his first impressions of Venice.
“Claude met us at Milan, as he’ll have told you,” he said, “and saw us safe here last night. It’s strange, though, going to your house in a boat, and such a smell as there was at the last corner but one before we got here I never encountered. I should have had it looked into in no time if such a thing had occurred in the works at Sheffield. But it seems fine and open here, and I’ve no doubt we shall be well enough off. But to think of those old Doges with never a bathroom in their houses, nor hot water laid on nor nothing. But I enjoy that, my dear; I want to see the old life as they had it, and look at their palaces, ah! and live in one, and see their pictures, and think what manner of folk they was, being born and getting married and dying and all, in the very rooms we now occupy.”
Dora suddenly laughed.
“Oh, Dad,” she said, “you are too heavenly. But why have you put on those thick clothes? It’s going to be a roasting day. I am glad to see you. I’m sure you will find the house comfortable, and, oh! did you ever see such a morning? Look out there across the lagoon. It’s Venice, you know, Venice!”
Mr. Osborne looked out through the iron grille.
“Well, I’m sure it’s pretty enough,” he said, “and talk of sea air, why the sea’s all round you. We must have come a matter of a mile over the viaduct last night after we left the mainland. And sea air is what I wantfor mother; she wants a bit of setting up, and if she feels inclined to keep quiet and not look at the galleries and churches and sights every day, my dear, you’ll know it’s because she isn’t quite up to the mark. Well, well; no, I’m not anxious about her, for she takes her food, and was as pleased to come out here, such as never was, but she’s been a bit tired, and must take a rest.”
“She’s not ill?” asked Dora. “There’s nothing wrong?”
“Not a bit of it. ’Tis true, I wanted her to see the doctor before she left home, but she wouldn’t hear a word of it. Just to go to Venice, so she said, and see Claude and Dora, and not do much, that’s the prescription for me, she said. And so here we are, my dear. Lunch at half-past twelve, too; how strange it seems! But after the breakfast they gave me, just a bit of toast and an egg, I don’t doubt I shall be ready for it. But the coffee was prime, though it came up in an earthenware pot. I suppose it was that way the Doges took it. Lor’, to think of it all! Wedding the sea, too, every year. I read it in the guidebook on the journey. A curious custom that was, heathenish, you may say. It takes one back, doesn’t it?”
It was still an hour before lunch time, and at Dora’s suggestion they went out for a turn in her gondola which was waiting, since Mrs. Osborne was not to be expected down till lunch time. Mr. Osborne, still feeling the insecurity of a foreign land, refused to change into more suitable clothes, and, already perspiring profusely, embarked with a sense of being prepared for anything.As they got in Dora gave some short direction to her gondolier in Italian, and this roused his admiring curiosity.
“It’s a strange thing too,” he said, “that you say something of which I can’t understand a syllable, and round the boat goes, as if you’d said, ‘Right about turn.’ Such a bother as we had with luggage and what not, before Claude met us. But Mrs. O. saw the hang of it, and kept saying, ‘Venice, Palazzo Dandoli,’ whenever one of them brigands looked in on us, and it seemed they wanted no more than that. Brigands they looked, my dear, though I dare say they were honest men in the employment of their company. And what’s that now, that big telegraph-looking thing?”
He pointed at the huge disfiguring posts that brought the electric power into Venice.
“Oh, electric light, I think,” said Dora. “Or perhaps it’s telephone.”
“My word, and I never expected to find either here,” said Mr. Osborne. “Do you mean they have got the light and the ’phone? And why, if that’s so, aren’t they installed in the Dandoli?”
“Oh, Dad,” she said, “where do you want to telephone to?”
“No, dearie, I don’t want to telephone, but you’d have thought that in a place like that I’ve taken they’d surely have had the modern conveniences, if such were to be had. And where are we coming to now?”
Dora did not answer at once; this was one of the best places of all in that city of best places. There was a sharp turn from a narrow canal, overhung by tall red-stained walls, and they shot out into the Grand Canal just above the Rialto.
“Oh,” she said, “look, look!”
The bow-shaped bridge lay to their left, as from the huddled houses they swept into the great waterway; a troubled reflection of palaces gleamed in the tide, the curve of the Grand Canal was flung outward and onward, reeling in the heat.
Just opposite was the fish market, newly rebuilt, with columns of ornamented iron work. Mr. Osborne pointed an admiring forefinger at it.
“Well I never,” he said, “to think to see the fellow of one of Per’s designs in Venice. I shall have the laugh of Per over that, and tell him he copied them from some old courtyard of the Doges, or what not. Beautiful I call them. After all, they were wonderful old folk, weren’t they, when we think that they put up there a design that might have been made in Sheffield to-day! I assure you, dearie, they are just like Per’s drawings for No. 2 light arcade same as is in the showroom at the works.”
Dora had not been attending very closely: those who love Venice are apt to be inattentive when some new magic comes into view, and to Dora the bow-arch of the bridge with the bow-arch of the canal below grew in wonder the oftener that she saw it.
“Arches?” she asked. “Arches like one of Per’s designs? Oh, do show me.”
“Why, that open place there,” said Mr. Osborne, still immensely interested. “That arcade just opposite, with the ornamental arches in open work.”
Dora could not help laughing.
“Oh, dear Dad,” she said, “very likely they are Per’s designs. That’s the new fish market, just being rebuilt.”
And then it struck her that her laugh might sound unkindly.
“It is quite possible they are Per’s designs,” she said. “Would it not be thrilling if they were? Giovanni”—again she spoke in Italian—“just land at the market and ask some of the workmen where the iron arches came from. I see one not yet put up, wrapped in straw. There is some label on it. See if it is from Osborne, Sheffield.”
Giovanni floated the gondola to the side of the landing place with the flick of a quick-turned oar, and got out. In a moment he came back, having read the stamped label on the packing, and reported the gratifying news.
“Oh, it’s too thrilling,” cried Dora, “to think that they came from your works. Dad, you’re a perfect wizard to see that, and guess it was Per’s. You must write to him and tell him that his ironwork is going up in Venice, and that you recognized it the first moment you—you saw the Grand Canal.”
Mr. Osborne gave a little inward tremolo of laughter.
“Oh, I’m not so blind yet,” he said, “and it’s seldom you see work like Per’s. There’s something, as you may say, so individual about it. God bless the boy, how he’ll like to hear that I spotted his design right across the Grand Canal. Eh, he might have been here, my dear, and studied the style of the architecture, when one sees how it fits in with the other monuments. I’ll write to tell him that.”
Mr. Osborne remembered that Dora had told him that Venice was the most beautiful place in the world,and the Grand Canal the most beautiful thing in Venice. And he made a concession that he did not really feel.
“Not but what he hadn’t got a lot to compete against,” he said. “That bridge now? That’s a fine thing. And the curve of it looks built for strength. I warrant there’s no iron girder made that would cause it to be safer. And the houses, beautiful, I’m sure! But I don’t see any that I’d sooner take than the Palazzo Dandoli.”
Suddenly Dora felt something dry up inside her. That, at any rate, was how she mentally phrased the sensation to herself. Her father-in-law was kind and wise and good; he was anxious to please, he was anxious to be pleased. But at the concession—for so she felt it to be—that Per had had a lot to compete with, when the excruciating iron arcade of the fish market was erected within stone-throw of the Rialto and within pea-shooting distance of the wondrous canal, she felt for the moment the impossibility of herself and Mr. Osborne being together at Venice. The situation was one that she had not faced without a tremor; now, for the moment, when it was actual and accomplished, it was inconceivable.
But this mercantile discovery had delighted Mr. Osborne; it had clearly raised his previous estimate of Venice. A town that could so aptly enshrine this design of Per’s was a town that must receive the best attention. There was probably more in it than he had been at first disposed to imagine. He gave it his best attention.
A gray fussing steamboat going seaward on the tide and raising a huge wash of churned water, next engaged his admiration.
“Well, and if I didn’t think when we took so long toget to the Palazzo last night that the Italians would be wiser to build a big sea wall somewhere, and raise the level of the canal so as you could drive a horse and carriage down them!” he said. “But if you’ve got a ferry steamer that goes the pace of that—Lor’, my dear, how it makes us rock—I don’t see what there’s to complain of. And calling first on this side and then on that, same as they used to do on the Thames, what could you ask for more convenient?”
Again Dora had to enlist her sympathy on a foreign side.
“I know,” she said, “and they go right out to the Lido, where we’ll go and bathe this very afternoon, Dad. It will be awfully hot after lunch, so we’ll join the steamer at San Marco, and send the gondola out to meet us on the Lido, and take us back when it gets cooler. One gets roasted in a gondola on the lagoon when it’s as hot as this.”
Mr. Osborne was clearly a little troubled at this suggestion.
“Ah, no doubt there are sets of bathing machines,” he said at length. “A dip in the briny: very pleasant.”
Dora did not at once grasp the cause of his embarrassment.
“We’ll swim right out together,” she said. “You can swim for ever in this sea; it’s so buoyant. And then we sit on the sand and eat strawberries, while the sun dries us again.”
Then she saw that some portentous doubt on the question of propriety was in Mr. Osborne’s mind, guessed it, and hastened to remove the cause of it. “Or perhaps, coming straight out from England, you don’t want tobathe,” she said. “Besides, there’s the mater”—she had adopted this from Claude. “So we won’t bathe; we’ll take her out for agiro—a row—in the gondola and have tea out on the lagoon. Dad, you’ll love the lagoon, all gray and green. And the electric light poles cross it to the Lido.”
“Eh, that will be nice,” said Mr. Osborne quickly and appreciatively. “And here’s another bridge: why, beautiful, isn’t it? I think I like it better than that curved one. There seems more sense in it. You don’t have to mount so high.”
They had passed round the last corner of the canal, and in front of them lay the straight lower reach of it that passes into the great basin opposite St. Mark’s and the Doge’s palace. To right and left the stately houses stood up from the water side, in glimmer of rose and blue and orange beneath the smiting glory of the noonday. Since yesterday the north wind, blowing lightly from the Alps, had banished the oppression of yesterday’s heat and the glitter of the city had awoke again, pearly in the shadow and jewelled in the sun. And in the immediate foreground the only blot of disfigurement was the object of Mr. Osborne’s admiration, the flat, execrable iron bridge opposite the Accademia. There it lay, convenient and hideous and impossible. And he liked it better than the curved one! It had more sense in it!
But there was no need for Dora to rack her brains to find some response which should steer a middle way between lack of cordiality to her father-in-law on the one hand and artistic perjury on the other. Between the fish market, the iron bridge, and the vile convenientspeed of the steamboats Venice was going up in his estimation by leaps and bounds, and he was delighted to find he was almost able to endorse Dora’s opinion on the town.
“Well, I call it all beautiful, my dear,” he said, “and it’s as I said to mother. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘if Dora says Venice is a nice place, you may be sure there is something in it, and we were right to come out and have a look at it ourselves.’ But who’d have thought there was so much of modern convenience and comfort? And these gondolas too. I’m sure I’m as comfortable sitting here as in my own brougham and, except when the steamers go by, they glide as smooth as on an asphalt road. Pretty the water is too, though not clear. I should have thought that here in the south there’d have been more of blue in it. But I’m a bit surprised, my dear, that you with your eye for colour shouldn’t have done up the gondola more brightly, had some blue curtains, maybe, or picked out that handsome carved work on the prow with a touch of red. There’s a thought too much black about it for my taste. Seems to tell of a funeral, almost.”
Dora could not argue about this: she could not give Mr. Osborne eyes which should see the value of the black blots of boats against the brightness of the sky mirrored in the canal. But it was easy to find praise in his speech to which she could respond, though the praise was expressed in a way that somehow set her teeth on edge.
“Oh, they are the most comfortable things in the world,” she said, “and I even like the indignant slap they give when the wash of the steamer crosses them. Beautiful thing, with its arching neck like some greatblack swan! Ah, there’s twelve striking. We shall just have time to look into our house and fetch Claude and then get back to the Dandoli for lunch. I hope they’ll have put it in the garden. Oh, Dad, how this place has got into my heart! You never did such a nice thing as when you gave Claude and me a month here.”
Mr. Osborne did not think much of Dora’s water-entrance to the great gray palace of which she had the first floor, but the size of the hugesala(which she remembered to tell him was a hundred and ten feet long) was most satisfactory to him. But with its polished stone-plaster floor, and the Venetian emptiness of it, it seemed to him rather bare and comfortless.
“Well, I’m sure it’s a handsome room enough in point of size,” he said, “and in this hot weather it looks cool and restful. But it seems strange to have never a strip of carpet on the floor, and scarce a picture on the walls. Lord, my dear, don’t it make your teeth chatter to think of coming down to this of a winter’s morning, when even now it strikes so cool? But isn’t there some Tintoret now, my dear, that you could fancy, or if not that, half a dozen big photographs of the canal and the bridge you liked so much to hang on the walls? And as for the floor, to be sure, it’s a big job to cover it, but a proper carpet for that end of it where you’ve got your chairs and table, looking out over the canal, you shall have, if I have to telegraph to town for one, instead of those few rugs, or mats I should call them. Fancy advertising this as a house to be let furnished! I call it misrepresentation.”
Dora took his arm.
“Oh, Dad, you are the kindest man that ever was,” she said. “But indeed I want neither pictures nor a carpet, though it is darling of you to offer me them. I like it empty: it’s the—the right style with these rooms. You found your dining room rather emptier than you liked, you know, but in a day or two you will get more than used to it, you will see how suitable it is. And I love this great empty room. Now we’ll just go into the other rooms, and then we must get back for lunch. Claude seems to be out: I expect we shall find him at the Dandoli.”
Lunch, as they found when they got back, had been laid, as Dora hoped, in the garden, in the centre of a gravelled space sheltered from the sun by the mellow brick wall and a clump of overarching delicate-fingered acacia trees, and made cool to the ear by the plash of the fountain into its marble basin. Down the sides and at the corners of this space were tubs of orange trees, and the heaviness of their drowsy fragrance mingling with the large dilution of this tide of warm sea-scented air was translated into something exquisitely light and vigorous. Claude had already arrived and was waiting with his mother for them, who was in excellent spirits.
“Why, dearest Dora,” she said, “here we are, and ready I’m sure for lunch, to speak for myself, though it’s not gone half-past twelve yet, and in England we shouldn’t be sitting down for another hour. And Claude’s been telling me that in England now it’s not gone half-past eleven, and here we are wanting our lunch at such an hour as that. Eh, what’s that? What did he say to me? ‘Pronto,’ it sounded like.”
Guiseppe, the smiling Italian butler, had approached Mr. Osborne, and said exactly that.
“Yes,pronto,” said Dora, “it means ‘ready.’”
Mrs. Osborne beamed back at Guiseppe.
“And I’mpronto, too,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
“Mrs. O. will be having the whole Italian language by heart before the week’s out,” said her husband. “And such a morning as I’ve had with Dora, mother. Bridges and canals and steamers and churches. Ah, and you’d never guess, so I’ll tell you without teasing you! They are rebuilding the fish market with arcades of iron pillars, very handsome, and who do you think supplies them? Osborne, Sheffield, and no other, my dear, and it’s Per’s No. 2, light arcade, same as is in the showroom, or I’m the more mistaken.”
Mrs. Osborne was as delighted as her husband.
“I’ll get a photograph of that this very afternoon,” she said, “if there’s such a thing as a photograph shop in Venice. Dora, my dear, have they a photograph shop in Venice, or hasn’t that got here yet?”
Dora threw back her head, laughing.
“Oh, mother, how divine of you!” she said. “Considering I sent you literally hundreds of picture post cards when Claude and I were here in the autumn!”
“To be sure you did, my dear,” said Mrs. Osborne cordially. “And it had gone clean out of my poor head. So a photograph of the fish market I’ll send to Per this very afternoon, if I have to turn over all their scrapbooks for it. Mr. O., you’ll never manage macaroni that way. Wrap it round your fork, my dear, as you see Claude doing, and in it goes without any bother.”
“Well, mother, you’re not so much of a hand at it yourself,” observed Mr. Osborne in self-defence. “If I’m to take pattern by Claude, you take pattern by Dora. Now, I call that an excellent dish. You couldn’t have it better done, not in your own house. What does he say to me, Dora, my dear?Banke, is it?”
“Bianco,” said Dora, “white. Will you have white wine or red?”
“That’s another word for Mrs. O.,” said her husband. “I told you she’d get it all off by heart in no time. Yes, I’ll have a go at the bianco. One wants something light and cool on a morning like this, especially if the true time is only half-past eleven.”
“I declare it makes me feel quite greedy,” said Mrs. Osborne, “but such an appetite as I have to-day I haven’t had since the middle of April. And what else have you seen this morning, Mr. Osborne? Give an account of the sights, my dear, or I shall think you’ve had no eye except for Dora.”
They waited in the cool greenness of the garden till the heat of the day began to abate, and then went all together in one gondola, at Mrs. Osborne’s particular wish, to begin the sights of Venice. It was in vain that Dora suggested that everybody would be much more comfortable if they took two gondolas, and arranged their rendezvous, for Mrs. Osborne’s heart was set on a family party and she wasn’t sure that she would trust Mr. O. with Dora alone any more that day. So, as badinage loomed on the horizon, Dora hastily and completely withdrew her opposition, and they all four squeezed into one gondola.