The Lovely Lady Part 16

"The right one, I am sure of that."

"But which?"

"I know now," Peter answered, "but I am certain that in the morning I shall not be able to remember."

It was true as Peter had said that the next morning he was in as much doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the s.p.a.cious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that lapped the fore-sh.o.r.e of remembrance.

After an hour in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he thought it might have been the Princess for the first word or two, until he turned and saw Miss Da.s.sonville. She was staring at the dim old canvases patched with saints, and her eyes were tender.

"They are not really saints, you know, they are only a sort of hieroglyphics that spell devotion. It isn't as though they had the breath of life breathed into them and could come down from their canvases as some of them do."

"Oh," he protested, "did you think of that for yourself? It was the Princess who said it to me."

"The Princess of the Dragon?"

"She came to me last night on the lagoon. It was wonderful,--the water shine and the rosy glow. I was wishing I had insisted on your coming, and all at once there was the Princess."

"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"

"She declined to commit herself. I suppose it's one of the things a man has to find out." He experienced a great lift of his spirit in the girl's light acceptance of his whimsicality, it was the sort of thing that Eunice Goodward used to be afraid to have any one hear him say lest they should think it odd. It occurred to him as he turned and walked beside Miss Da.s.sonville that if he had come to Italy with Eunice there might have been a great deal that she would not have liked to hear. He could think things of that sort of her now with a queer lightness as of ease after strain, and yet not think it a merit of Miss Da.s.sonville's so to ease him. They walked through the rooms full of the morning coolness, and let the pictures say what they would to them.

"It is strange to me," said the girl, "the reality of pictures; as if they had reached a point under the artist's hand where they became suddenly independent of him and went about saying a great deal more than he meant and perhaps more than he could understand. I am sure they must have a world of their own of picture rock and tree and stone, where they go when they are not being looked at on their canvases."

"Oh, haven't you found them, then?"

"In dreams you mean? Not in Bloombury; they don't get so far from home.

One of these little islands I suspect, that lie so low and look so blue and airy."

"Will you go with me in the gondola to discover it?"

"To-night?"

"To-morrow." He was full of a plan to take her and Mrs. Merrithew to the Lido that same evening to have dinner, and to come home after moonrise, to discover Venice. She agreed to that, subject to Mrs. Merrithew's consent, and they went out to find that lady at a bead shop where she spent a great many hours in a state of delightful indecision.

Mrs. Merrithew proving quite in the mood for it, they went to the Lido with an extra gondolier--Miss Da.s.sonville had stipulated for one who could sing--and came home in time to see Venice all a-flower, with the continual slither of the gondolas about it like some slim sort of moth.

They explored Saint George of the Sea Weed after that, took tea in the public gardens and had a day at Torcello. On such occasions when Peter and Mrs. Merrithew talked apart, the good lady who got on excellently with the rich Mr. Weatheral grew more than communicative on the subject of Savilla Da.s.sonville. It was not that she talked of the girl so much nor so freely, but that she left him with the sense of her own exasperation at the whole performance. It was a thin little waif of a story as it came from Mrs. Merrithew, needing to be taken in and comforted before it would yield even to Peter, who as a rich man had come to have a fair discernment in pitiable cases, the faint hope of a rescue. There had been, to begin with, the death of the girl's mother at her birth, followed by long years of neglect growing out of just that likeness to the beloved wife which first excited her father's aversion and afterward became the object of a jealous, insistent tenderness.

After his wife's death, Dave Da.s.sonville had lost his grip on his property as he had on all the means of living. Later he was visited by a stringency which Mrs. Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence, which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its consequences. Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that she had taught the village school.

The winter before, tramping through the heavy snow, she had contracted a bronchitis that had developed so alarmingly as to demand, by the authority of the local doctor, "a trip somewhere"--"and n.o.body," said Mrs. Merrithew, "but me to go with her."

"Not," she added, "that I'm complainin'. Merrithew left me well off, and there's no denyin' travellin's improvin' to the mind, though at my age it's some wearin' to the body. I'm glad," she further confided to Peter at Torcello, "she takes so to Venice. It's a lot more comfortable goin'

about in a gondola. At Rome, now, I nearly run my legs off."

It was later when Savilla had been kept at home by a slight indisposition from a shower that caught them unprepared, she expressed her doubt of a winter in Italy being anything more than a longer stick with which to beat a dog.

"She will have spent all her money on it, and the snow will be just as deep in Bloombury next year. There isn't anything _really_ the matter with her, but she's just too fine for it. It's like seeing a clumsy person handlin' one of them spun gla.s.s things, the way I have to sit still and see Providence dealing with Savilla Da.s.sonville. It may be sort of sacrilegious to say so, but I declare it gives me the fidgets."

It ought of course to have given Peter, seeing the interest he took in her, a like uneasiness; but there was something in the unmitigated hardness of her situation that afforded him the sort of eas.e.m.e.nt he had, inexplicably, in the plainness of her dress. His memory was not working well enough yet for him to realize that it was relief from the strain of the secondary feminity that had fluttered and allured in Eunice Goodward.

It was even more unclearly that he recognized that it had been a strain.

All this time he had been forgetting her--and how completely he had forgotten her this new faculty for comparison was proof--he had still been enslaved by her appearance. It was an appearance, that of Eunice's, which he admired still in the young American women at the expensive hotels where he had put up, and admitted as the natural, the inevitable sign of an inward preciousness. But if he allowed to himself that he would never have spoken to Savilla Da.s.sonville that day at San Marco, if she had been to the eye anything that Eunice Goodward was, he told himself it was because he was not sure from behind which of those charming ambuscades the arrows of desolation might be shot. If he gave himself up now to the play of the girl's live fancy he did so in the security of her plainness, out of which no disturbing surprises might come. And she left him, in respect to her hard conditions, without even the excuse for an att.i.tude. Eunice had been poor in her world, and had carried it with just that admixture of bright frankness and proud reserve which, in her world, supported such a situation with most charm.

She made as much use of her difficulties as a Spanish dancer of her shawl; but Savilla Da.s.sonville was just poor, and that was the end of it. That he got on with her so well by the simple process of talking out whatever he was most interested in, occurred to Peter as her natural limitation. It was not until they had been going out together for a week or more, in such fashion as his mending health allowed, that he had moments of realizing, in her swift appropriations of Venice, rich possibilities of the personal relations with which he believed himself forever done. Oddly it provoked in him the wish to protect, when the practical situation had left him dry and bare.

It was the evening of the _Serenata_. They were all there in the gondola, Mrs. Merrithew and the girl, with Luigi squatting by Giuseppe, not too far from the music float that sprang mysteriously from the black water in arching boughs of red and gold and pearly Aladdin's fruit.

Behind them the lurking prows rustled and rocked drunkenly with the swell to which they seemed at times attentively to lean. They could make out heads crowded in the gondolas, and silver gleams of the prows as they drifted past palaces lit intermittently by a red flare that wiped out for the moment, the seastain and disfiguring patches of restoration.

They had pa.s.sed the palace of Camerleigh. The jewel-fruited arbour folded and furled upon itself to pa.s.s the slow curve of the Rialto, and suddenly, Peter's attention, drawn momentarily from the music, was caught by that other bright company leaning from deserted balconies, swarming like the summer drift between the pillars of dark loggias. They were all there, knights and saints and ladies, out of print and paint and marble, and presently he made out the Princess. She was leaning out of one of the high, floriated windows, looking down on him with pleased, secret understanding as she might have smiled from her palace walls on the festival that brought the young knight George home with the conquered dragon. It was the compressed and pregnant meaning of her gaze that drew his own upward, and it was then when the Lovely Lady turned and waved her hand at him that he felt the girl stir strangely beside him.

"How full the night is of the sense of presences," she said, "as if all the loved marbles came to life and the adored had left their canvases. I cannot think but it is so."

"Oh, I am sure of it."

She moved again with the vague restlessness of one stared upon by innumerable eyes. "How one would like to speak," she said. "They seem so near us."

There was a warm tide of that nearness rising in Peter's blood. As the music flowed out again in summer fullness, he put out his arm along the back of the seat instinctively in answer to the girl's shy turning, the natural movement of their common equity in the night's unrealized wonder.

IX

"Peter! oh, Peter!"

It was dark in the room when Peter awoke, but he knew it was morning by the salt smell which he thought came into the room from the cove beyond Bloombury pastures, until he roused in his bed and knew it for the smell of the lagoons. He looked out to see the beginning of rose light on the world and understood that he was called. He did not hear the voice again but out there in the shimmering s.p.a.ce the call awaited him. It might be the Princess.

He dressed and got down quietly into the shadowed city and waked a frowsy gondolier asleep in his gondola. They spoke softly, both of them, before the morning hush, as they swung out into the open water between the towers of San Georgio fairily dim, and the pillars of the saints; the city floated in a mist of blueness, the dome of the Saluti faintly pearled.

"_Dove, Signore?_" The gondolier feathered his oar.

"_Un giro_"--Peter waved his arm seaward; the dip of the oar had a stealthy sound in the deserted dawning. They pa.s.sed the public gardens and saw the sea widen and the morning quicken. Islands swam up out of silver s.p.a.ce, took form and colour, and there between the islands he saw the girl. She had gotten another oar from Giuseppe and stood delighting in the free motion; her sleeves were rolled up, her hat was off, her hair blew out; alive and pliant she bent to the long sweep of it, and her eyes were on the morning wonder. But when she caught sight of Peter she looked only at him and he knew that her seeing him appearing thus on the shining water was its chief and exquisite wonder, and that she did not know what he saw. The gondolier steered straight for the girl without advice; he had thought privately that the _Signore Americano_ was a little mad, but he knew now with what manner of madness.

They drew close and drifted alongside. Peter did not take his eyes from the girl's eyes lest for her to look away ever so slightly from there to his face would be to discover that he knew; and he did not know how he stood with himself toward that knowledge.

"Oh," she said breathlessly, "I wanted you--I called you--and you came!

You did not know where I was and yet you came?"

"I heard you calling."

She left her oar and sat down; Peter laid his hand on the edge of her gondola and they drifted side by side.

"May I come with you?" he asked presently.

She made a little gesture, past all speech. Peter held up a hand full of silver toward his gondolier and laid it on the seat as he stepped lightly over. The man slid away from them without word or motion, and together they faced the morning. It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of burnished light; islands lifted in mirage, floated miraculously upon the verge of s.p.a.ce. Behind them the mainland banked like a new created world over which waited the Hosts of the ranked Alps.

Winged boats from Murano slid through the flat lagoons.

There was very little to say. Peter was aware chiefly, in what came from her to him, of the wish to be very tender toward it, of having it in hand to support her securely above the abyss into which he felt at the least rude touch of his, she must immeasurably fall. At the best he could but keep with her there at the point of her unconsciousness by knowing the truth himself, as he felt amazingly that he did know it with all the completeness of his stripped and beggared past.