The Lovely Lady Part 20

"Ho!" said the captain, chirking up. "I could 'a' told ye that the fust time I laid eyes on ye. But I'll tell ye this: ye can't do nothing in a hurry in this country. The only place where a man can do things up as soon as he thinks of 'em is on the blue water. We don't have red tape on shipboard, I can tell you. The skipper's the law and the government."

"Could you marry people?"

"Well, I ain't to say in the habit of it, but it's the law that I could."

"Then if we get tangled up with the consul," said Peter, "we'll have to fall back on you," and they took it as an excellent piece of fooling which they were later to come back to as a matter of serious resort.

"Of course," said the consul, "I could marry you and it would be legal if you chose to count it so at home, but if you are thinking of taking a house here and of making an extended residence I shouldn't advise it. As to Captain Dunham's suggestion, it's not wholly a bad one. Not being in Italy, the Italians can't take exception to it, and if it is properly witnessed and recorded at home it ought to stand."

They couldn't of course take it in all at once that they were simply to sail out there into the ethereal blueness and to come back from it with the right to live together. However, it made for a great unanimity of opinion as they talked it over on the way home, that, since so much was lacking from Peter's marriage that he had dreamed went to it, and so much more had come into Savilla's than she had dared to imagine, it mattered very little what else was added or left out.

"I suppose," suggested Miss Da.s.sonville, "Mrs. Merrithew will think it dreadful." But as it turned out Mrs. Merrithew thought very well of it.

"On a United States boat with a United States minister--there is one here I've found out--it seems a lot safer than to trust to these foreign ways. If you was to be married in Italian I should never be certain you wouldn't wake up some morning and find yourself not married. And then how should I feel!" As to the palace plan, she threw herself into it with heavy alacrity. "I s'pose I've got to see you through," she said, "and it will give me something to think about. I don't suppose you have any intention that way, but an engaged couple isn't very good company."

It transpired that the _Merrythought_ would put out to the high seas on the twenty-second, and it was in the flutter of their practical adjustments to meet this date that Peter found the ten days of his engagement move so swiftly; to engage servants, to interview tradespeople, to prune the neglected garden--it was Savilla's notion that they should do this themselves--all the stir of domestic life made so many points of advantage to support him above that dryness of despair from which he had moments of feeling himself all too hardly rescued. He had come up out of it sufficiently by the help that Italy afforded, to glimpse once more the country of his dreams, only by this act of his marriage to turn his back on it forever. Savilla Da.s.sonville was a dear little thing; if it came to that, a revered and valued thing, but she was not, he had never pretended it, the Lovely Lady, and the door that shut them in as man and wife was to shut _her_ forever out of his life.

And yet though this was his accepted, his official position, it was remarkable even to himself how much less frequently as the preparations for his marriage went forward, he found himself obliged to fall back upon it; how much more he projected himself into his future as the adored and protecting male. He recalled in this connection that the Princess had said to him that he should visit his House no more, and it was part of the proof of the notion he entertained toward himself as a man done with the imaginative life, that he accepted it with no more fuss about it. He had in fact his mind's eye on a piece of ground which Lessing could buy for him, on the river, an hour from the city, where he could manage for Savilla at least, a generous subst.i.tute for dreams, and a situation for himself for which he began to discover more appet.i.te than he would have believed. It was likely, he thought, that he would himself take a turn at planning the garden.

It was very early in the morning when the wedding party which had been reinforced by the consul, the mistress of Casa Frolli, and the minister, who had turned out to be exactly of Mrs. Merrithew's persuasion, went aboard the _Merrythought_, blooming out amazingly in bunting and roses for the occasion. The morning blueness had drained out from the city and stained the waters eastward as they put out between the red and yellow sails of the fishing fleet. They saw the cypress-towered islands of romance melt in the morning haze. The steam launch which was to take them ash.o.r.e again ploughed alongside, and there was a pleasant sort of home smell from the cook's quarters.

Peter sat forward with the bride's hand tucked under his arm and presently he heard her laughing softly, delightedly.

"Peter, do you know what that is, that good smell I mean?"

"What do you think it is?"

"It's pie baking. Truly, don't you think I'm enough of a housewife to know that?"

"I know you're everything you ought to be."

"It is pie, there's no doubt about it, but we must pretend to be awfully surprised when the captain brings it out. But Peter, don't you like it?"

"Pie, my dear?"

"No, but like having everything so homey and--and--so genuine at our wedding?"

"I hope," said Peter, "it's genuine pie, but I see what you mean, my dear."

"It's an omen, almost, that we'll always have the good, comfortable, common things to fall back upon, if our marriage should not prove quite all we've dreamed it. It's been so perfect up to now; it must drop down out of the clouds some time."

It seemed rather to have taken a sweep upward when, with sails swelling over them and the beat of the sea under the bows, they stood up to be married, and to exhibit capacities of sustaining itself at a level from which not the very soggy and sallow complexioned pie with the cook grinning behind it, could dislodge the two most concerned in it. It wore through the day to a contained and quiet gayety at a dinner which took place in the _ristoranta_ over the water where they had once lunched with the captain, and lasted until Peter had brought his wife home again to the refurnished palace. It had gone, as he told himself, remarkably well, with every intimation, as he had time to tell himself in his last hours in the garden with his cigar, of going much better, of becoming as the place gave him occasion to indulge the figure, an enclosed and fragrant garden, in which if no flaming angel of desire kept the gate for him, he had at least the promise of refreshment.

That old pa.s.sion for Eunice Goodward, all his feelings for all the women he had known, served to show him what Savilla had meant when she said he "gave her so much room"--the renewed sense of the s.p.a.ciousness of life.

It would be there for his wife at the completest, and if she had, as it seemed, turned him out of the Wonderful House in order to live in it herself, he at least kept the gates. And was not this the proper business for a man? He recalled what the Princess had said to him so long ago when he had first begun to think of himself as a bachelor. "It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pa.s.s." Well, he had dreamed and he had slain some dragons. Later there would be children playing in the House, daughters perhaps ... Lovely Ladies. The world would be a better place for them to walk about in because of all that he had lost and been.

When he went into the garden he had half expected that the Princess would speak to him; the place was full of hints of her, faint and persuasive as the scent of the flowers in the dark, little riffles of his pulse, flushed surfaces, the tingling of his palms which announced her, but she did not speak. He said to himself that he was now a well man and had seen the last of her. Never before had he felt so very well.

He saw the light moving in the palace behind him as his wife moved to complete some of her arrangements; he heard her then pacing along the marble floor of the great hall which went quite through the middle of it--she must be going to her room, and in a little while he would go in to her--he heard the light tapping of her feet and then he saw her come, the lit lamp in her hand.

She had on still the white dress in which she had been married, and over it she had thrown the silver-woven scarf which had been one of his first gifts to her, and as she came the light glittered on it; it drew from the polished walls bright reflections in which, amid the gilded frames, he saw the dim old pictures start and waver--and as he saw her coming so, Peter threw away his cigar and gripped suddenly at the bal.u.s.trade to steady him where he stood, against what out of some far spring of his youth rushed upon him, as he saw her come--as he had always seen her, as he knew now he was to see her always--his wife and the Lovely Lady.

THE END