Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories Part 8

She was like a plant flowering in the garden--a plant, part lily, part hyacinth.

"And you do not want me," she began, softly, less to him than to herself. "I don't fit in. You cannot take me up and put me aside, at your will. You would be _mine_."

"Good!"

"It should have been different. We should never have met. They should have made you a saint, or a priest, or a pastor for the bleeding world.

You are a trifle late; half a century ago, you could have given your soul to G.o.d, quite easily, and not bothered about one woman."

"Yes, I agree, but that was settled by the way the world has ground,"

the young man sighed. "Why should it bother you, my fooling with the forlorn and wretched--the others? Any more than I mind your dealings with men?"

They turned about and crossed the dozen paces to the Redentore wall where lay a blade of dark shade.

"You could flirt with the mult.i.tude? Yes, I should object," she looked at him slowly, "I couldn't understand it."

He threw his head back as if to look beyond Venice.

"The maimed in body and spirit," he muttered.

"They call you; I call you; you----"

"I was starved," he pleaded, "I love flesh and glory, too."

She laughed unconcernedly.

"Oh, no. I think not. You are trying to very hard. You think you are enjoying your wine and your figs and the sun; but you say a prayer."

Her words taunted him. The vines on the villino swayed in the sun.

"Come, we will go out to the water, and I will master your doubt."

They stood silent, looking at each other, half curiously. At length she uttered what was common to their minds.

"Marry the world; it woos you. Love me and leave me; love another and leave her. The world, that is your mistress."

"And the world incarnate, that is you. The world, breathing, living, loving, the world a pa.s.sion of delight."

Their hands touched for a moment. Then she said, hastily:

"Too late! There is Caspar. I forgot we were to go to Burano. Will you join us?"

A figure in white ducks was coming toward them. His cordial smile seemed to include a comment--a mental note of some hint he must give.

"In stalks the world of time and place," the young man muttered. "No, I will not go with you."

He helped her into the waiting gondola. She settled back upon the cushions, stretched one languid arm in farewell. He could feel the smile with which she swept Caspar Severance, the women at work in the rio over their kettles, the sun-bright stretch of waters--all impartially.

He lay down in the shade of the Redentore wall. Eight weeks ago there had been a dizzy hour, a fainting scene in a crowded court-room, a consultation with a doctor, the conventional prescription, a fortnight of movement--then _this_. He had cursed that combination of nerve and tissue; equally he cursed this. One word to his gondolier and in two hours he could be on the train for Milan, Paris, London--then indefinite years of turning about in the crowd, of jostling and being jostled. But he lay still while the sun crept over him.

She was so unreal, once apart from her presence, like an evanescent mirage on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen her, heard her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had touched him; that there had been moments when she stood with the flowers of the garden.

He shook the drowsy sun from his limbs and went away, closing the door softly on the empty garden. Venice, too, was a shadow made between water and sun. The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of cool water alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens, until he came to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down of men.

III

In the afternoon Lawrence and Severance were dawdling over coffee in the Piazza. A strident band sent up voluminous notes that boomed back and forth between the palace and the stone arches of the procurate.

"And Burano?" Lawrence suggested, idly. The older man nodded.

"We lunched there--convent--Miss Barton bought lace."

He broke the pause by adding, negligently:

"I think I shall marry her."

Lawrence smoked; he could see the blue water about San Giorgio.

"Marry her," he repeated, vaguely. "You are engaged?"

Severance nodded.

The young man reached out a bony hand. One had but to wait to still the problems of life. They strolled across the piazza.

"When do you leave?" Severance inquired.

"To-night," almost slipped from the young man's lips. He was murmuring to himself. "I have played with Venice and lost. I must return to my busy village."

"I can't tell," he said.

Severance daintily stepped into a gondola. "La Giudecca."

Lawrence turned into the swarming alleys leading to the Rialto.

Streams of Venetians were eddying about the cul-de-sacs and enclosed squares, hurrying over the bridges of the ca.n.a.ls, turning in and out of the calles, or coming to rest at the church doors. Lawrence drifted tranquilly on. He had slipped a cable; he was free and ready for the open sea. Following at random any turning that offered, he came out suddenly upon Verocchio's black horseman against the black sky. The San Zanipolo square was deserted; the cavernous San Zanipolo tenanted by tombs. Stone figures, seated, a-horse, lying carved in death, started out from the silent walls.

"Condottieri," the man muttered, "great robbers who saw and took!

Brisegh.e.l.la, Mocenigo, Leonardo Loredan, Vittore Capello." He rolled the powerful names under his breath. "They are right--Take, enjoy; then die." And he saw a hill sleeping sweetly in the mountains, where the sun rested on its going down, and a villino with two old trees where the court seemed ever silent. In the stealthy, pa.s.sing hours she came and sat in the sun, and _was_. And the two remembered, looking on the valley road, that somewhere lay in the past a procession of storms and mornings and nights which was called the world, and a procession of people which was called life. But she looked at him and smiled.

Outside in the square the transparent dusk of Venice settled down. In the broad ca.n.a.l of the Misericordia a faint plash and drip from a pa.s.sing gondola; then, in a moment, as the boat rounded into the rio, a resounding "Stai"; again silence and the robber in bronze.

IV

He waited for a sign from the Giudecca. He told himself that Theodosia Barton was not done with him yet, nor he with her.

The tourist-stream, turning northward from Rome and Florence, met in Venice a new stream of Germans. The paved pa.s.sage beside the hotel garden was alive with a cosmopolitan picnic party. Lawrence lingered and watched; perhaps when the current set strongly to the north again, it would carry him along with it.