The Lovely Lady Part 14

He realized as the girl's eyes filled with tears, that this must have been the child at whose birth, he had heard, the mother had died. "But I suppose we mustn't talk about Bloombury in San Marco," he blamed his inadvertence, "though that doesn't seem to want talking about either.

When you said that just now about its being a picture-book, I was thinking how like it was to one of those places I used to go to in my youth--you know where you go in your mind when you don't like the place where you are. So like. I used to call it the House of the Shining Walls."

"I know," she nodded, "mine is a garden."

"_Is?_" said Peter. "There's where you have the advantage of me."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, spreading her hands toward the pictured wall and the springing domes, "isn't this the evidence that it _is_ always. Let us look."

The ma.s.s was over and the crowd departing; they moved from page to page to the storied wall and identified in it the springs of a common experience.

"It's like nothing so much," said Miss Da.s.sonville, "as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on the ground."

"Something like that," admitted Peter.

"And that's why," said Miss Da.s.sonville, "it doesn't make me feel at _all_ religious. Just--just--maternal."

It appeared by this time they had become well enough acquainted for Peter to remark that she didn't seem to feel under any obligation to experience the prescribed and traditional thrill.

"Well, I'm divided in my mind. I don't want to overlook any of the facts, and I want to give the poor imprisoned things a chance, if they have anything to say that the guide books have missed, to get it off their minds. I've always heard that celebrities grow tired of being forever taken at their public valuation. I've got a _Baedeker_ and a _Hare_ and _The Stones of Venice_ but I neglect them quite as much as I read them, don't you?"

They had come down into the nave and she went about stroking the fair marbles delicately as though there sprang a conscious communication from the touch. He felt his mind accommodating to the ease of hers with a movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that the cloud ma.s.s which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved in rain.

"And I haven't even an umbrella," explained Miss Da.s.sonville with a real dismay.

"But I'll take you home in my gondola," it appeared to him providentially provided for this contingency; "it is here at the Piazzetta."

"Oh, have you a gondola, and is it as much of a help as people say? Mrs.

Merrithew hates walking, but we didn't know if we should like it."

They whisked around the corner under the arcade of the ducal palace, and almost before they reached the _traghetto_ the shower was stayed and the sun came out on the lucent water. Peter allowed Miss Da.s.sonville to give the direction lest she should think it a liberty of him to have noticed and remembered it, but he added something to it that caused her, as they swung out into the ca.n.a.l, to enter an expostulation.

"But this is not the way to the Casa Frolli!"

"It's one way; besides, it isn't raining any more, and if you are thinking of taking a gondola you ought to make a trial trip or two, and it's worth seeing how the palace looks from the ca.n.a.l."

The rain began again in a little while, whitening the water; the depth of it blackened to the cloud but the surface frothed like quicksilver under the steady patter. The awning was up and they were safe against a wetting, but Peter saw the girl shiver in the slight chill, and looking at her more attentively he perceived that she might recently have been ill. The likeness to her mother came out then in spite of her plainness, the hands, the eyes, the pleasant way of smiling; it was that no doubt which had set him on the trail of his old dreams. He tried, more for the purpose of avoiding it than for any curiosity, to remember what he had ever heard of David Da.s.sonville that would account for his daughter's teaching school when she evidently wasn't able for it, but he talked of Mrs. Merrithew.

"I must call on her," he said, "as soon as she will permit me. But tell me, what business did I do with her husband?"

"It was a mortgage--those poor McGuires, you know, were in such trouble, and you----"

"Yes, I was always nervous about mortgages. I was bitten by one once.

But dear me, I did not expect to have my youthful indiscretions coming out like this. What else did she tell you?"

The girl laughed delightedly. "Well, we did rather talk you over. She said you were such a good son. Even when you were a young man on a salary your mother had a best black silk and a second best."

"Women are the queerest!" Peter commented at large. "It was always such a comfort to Ellen that mother had a good silk to be buried in. Now what is there talismanic about silk?"

"It's evidence," she smiled, "and that's what women require most."

"Well, I hope Mrs. Merrithew will accept it as evidence that I am a suitable person to take you out in a gondola this evening. You haven't seen Venice by night?"

"Only as we came from the station. I'm sure she would like you to call, and I hope she will like the gondola."

"Oh, she will like it," Peter a.s.sured Miss Da.s.sonville as he helped her out in front of the Casa Frolli; "it will remind her of a rocking chair."

Mrs. Merrithew did like the gondola; she liked everything:--the s.p.a.cious dark, the scudding forms like frightened swans, the sound of singing on the water, the soft bulks of foliage that overhung them in the narrow _calle_, the soundless hatchet-faced prows that rounded on them from behind dim palaces; and she liked the gondola so much that she asked Peter "right out" what it cost him.

"We would have taken one ourselves," she explained without waiting, "only we didn't feel able to afford it. Fifty francs a week they wanted to charge us, but maybe that was because we were Americans; they think Americans can do everything over here. But I suppose you get yours cheap at the hotel?"

"Oh, much cheaper."

"How much?"

"Forty francs," hazarded Peter. "I'm sure I could get you one for that.

Unless ... if you don't mind...." He made what he hadn't done yet under any circ.u.mstances, a case out of his broken health to explain how by not getting up very early and by taking some prescribed exercise, Giuseppe and the gondola had to lie unused half the mornings, which was very bad for them.... "So," he persuaded them, "if you would be satisfied with it for half a day, I would be very much obliged to you if you would take it ... share and share alike." There was as much hesitation in Peter's speech as if it had really been the favour he seemed to make it, though in fact it grew out of his attempt to fashion his offer by what he saw in the dusk of Miss Da.s.sonville's face. "In the evenings," he finished, "we could take it turn about. There are a great many evenings when I don't go out at all."

"Me, too," consented Mrs. Merrithew cheerfully. "I get tired easy, but you and Savilla could go." The proposal appealed to her as neighbourly, and it was quite in keeping with the character of a successful business man, as he was projected on the understanding of Bloombury, to wish not to keep paying for a thing of which he had no use. "I think we might as well close with it at once, don't you, Savilla?"

"If you are sure it's only forty francs----" Miss Da.s.sonville was doubtful.

"Quite sure," Peter was very prompt. "You see they keep them so constantly employed at the hotel"--which seemed satisfactorily to make way for the arrangement that the gondola was to call for the two ladies the next morning.

"Giuseppe," Weatheral demanded as he stepped out of the gondola at the hotel landing, "how much do I pay you?"

"Sixty francs, _Signore_."

Peter had no doubt the extra ten was divided between his own man and the gondolier, but he was not thinking of that.

"I have a very short memory," he said, "and I have told the _Signora_ and the _Signorina_ forty francs. If they ask you, you are to tell them forty francs; and listen, Beppe, every franc over that you tell them, I shall deduct from your _pourboire_ when I leave, do you understand?"

"_Si, Signore_."

VIII

A morning or two after the arrangement about the gondola Peter was leaning over the bridge of San Moise watching the sun on the copper vessels the women brought to the fountain, when his man came to him.

This Luigi he had picked up at Naples for the chief excellence of his English and a certain seraphic bearing that led Peter to say to him that he would cheerfully pay a much larger wage if he could only be certain Luigi would not cheat him.

"Oh _Signore!_ In Italy? _Impossible!_"

"In that case," said Peter, "if you can't be honest with me, be as honest as you can"--but he had to accept the lifted shoulders and the Raphael smile as his only security. However, Luigi had made him comfortable and as he approached him now it was without any misgiving.

"I have just seen Giuseppe and the gondola," he announced. "They are at the Palazza Rezzonico, and after that they go to San Georgio degli Sclavoni. There are pictures there."