it was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at the britania, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "though i didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened[pg 192] head, "i really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." having made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever interested him.
it did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of venice, that he had not thought once of eunice goodward, but only of those who had touched his life without hurting it. he was so far indeed from thinking of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet her again.
"i must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."[pg 193]
he looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals, for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round hat who might have come from bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the day after, and in the meantime venice took him.
the ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. it was, as he told himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him, that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the continuity of the world of youth and passion. his being able to see it so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his dreams, missed them both on his own account.
it was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty droves of doves. high over the door[pg 194] the gold horses of lysippus breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approaching temporale. he was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was not for some moments after he had turned into st. mark's, obsessed of the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. it was first of all the smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed instinctively to the elevated host, the snare of the intricate mosaic pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as it had been in the house!
it was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. he climbed up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which had failed to preserve[pg 195] to him any image of how his father looked, and yet had so furnished all his imagination. which didn't make any less of a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, peter weatheral, of the firm of weatheral, lessing & co., real estate brokers, what it was all about.
"it's a picture-book of the heart of man," he concluded, and no sooner had he shaped this thought in his mind than he heard it uttered for him on the opposite side of the pillar in a voice made soft by indulgent tenderness, "just a great picture-book." he leaned forward at the sound far enough to have a glimpse of the girl from home, and smiled at her.
"so you've found that out, have you?" it was not strange to find himself addressing her friendlily nor to hear her answer him.
"just a picture-book," she repeated. "it explains so much. what the saints were to them, and the holy personages. monkish tales to prey upon their superstition, we were taught. but you can see here what they really were, the wonder tales of a people, the fairy wonder and the blessed happenings come true as they do in dreams. oh, it must have been a[pg 196] good time when the saints were on the earth."
"you believe in them, then?"
"here in san marco, yes. but not when i am in bloombury."
"oh!" cried peter, "are you really from bloombury? i knew you were from up country but i hardly dared to hope—if you will permit me——" he searched for his card which she accepted without looking at it.
"you are mr. peter weatheral, aren't you? mrs. merrithew thought she recognized you yesterday."
"is that why she glared at me so? but anyway i am obliged to her, though i haven't vestige of a recollection of her."
"she didn't suppose you had. her husband sold you some land once. but of course everybody in bloombury knows the mr. weatheral who went from there to the city and made his fortune."
"a sorry one," said peter. "but if you are really from bloombury why don't i remember you? i go there with ellen every summer, and she knows everybody."
"yes; she is so kind. everybody says that.[pg 197] but i'm really from harmony. i taught the bloombury school last year. i am savilla dassonville."
"oh, i knew your father then! now that i come to think of it, it was he who laid the foundation of my greatness," peter smiled whimsically. "and i knew your mother; she was a very lovely lady."
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[pg 198] toward the pictured wall and the springing domes, "isn't this the evidence that it is always. let us look."
the mass 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 dassonville, "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 dassonville, "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[pg 199] 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 mass 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 dassonville 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[pg 200] 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 dassonville 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 canal, 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 canal."
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[pg 201] 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 dassonville 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[pg 202] 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 assured miss dassonville 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 spacious 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.[pg 203]
"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 circumstances, 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[pg 204] he saw in the dusk of miss dassonville'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 dassonville 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?"[pg 205]
"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."
