The Lovely Lady
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Mary Austin >> The Lovely Lady
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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 space 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 passed the public gardens
and saw the sea widen and the morning quicken. Islands swam up out of
silver space, 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 space. 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.
They drifted and saw the morning widen into the working-day. Market
boats piled with fruit, fish in shining heaps, wood boats of Istria,
went by with Madonna painted sails. Among the crowded goods the women
sat Madonna-wise and nursed their bambini, or cherishing the recurrent
hope, knitted interminably. If he wanted any evidence of what he
admitted between the girl and himself it flashed out for him in the
faces of the market wives, on whom labour and maternity sat not too
heavily to cloud the primal radiance. It was there in their soft _Buon
giorno_ in the way they did not, as the gondola drew beside them, cover
their fruitful breasts from her tender eyes, in the way most fall, they
grasped in the high mood of the _forestieri_ a sublimity untouched by
the niceties of bargaining. A man in the state of mind to which the
girl's visible shine confessed, could hardly be expected to stickle at
the price of the few figs and roses which served as an easy passage from
the wonder of their meeting to the ground of their accustomed gay
pretences. They made of Peter's purchases of fruit and flowers a market
garden of their own from which they had but just come on hopeful
errands. They made believe again as boats thickened like winged things
in a summer garden, to be bent upon discovery, and slid with pretended
caution under the great ships stationed by the Giudecca, from which they
heard sailors singing. They shot with exaggerated shivers past a slim
cruiser and suddenly Miss Dassonville clutched Peter by the arm.
"Oh!" she cried: "Do you see it? That little dark, impudent-looking one,
and _the_ flag?"
Peter saw; he was not quite, he reminded her, even in the intoxication
of a morning on the lagoons with her, quite in that state where he
couldn't see his country's flag when it was pointed out to him. They
came alongside with long strokes, and sniffed deliciously.
"Ah--um--um----" said Miss Dassonville. "I know what that is. It's ham
and eggs. How long since you've had a real American breakfast?"
"Not since I left the steamer," Peter confessed. "Now if I were to smell
hot cakes I shouldn't be able to stand it. I should go aboard her."
Miss Dassonville saluted softly as they went under the bright banner.
"'Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light,'" she began to sing and
immediately a large, blooming face rose through a mist of faded whisker
at the prow and they saw all the coast of Maine looking down on them
from the rail of the _Merrythought_.
"United States, ahoy?" it said.
They came close under and Miss Dassonville hailed in return; as soon as
the captain saw her face smiling up at him he beamed on it as the women
in the boats had done.
"We smelled your breakfast," she explained, and the man laughed
delightedly.
"I know what kind these Dagoes give ye. Come up and have some."
Peter and the girl consulted with their eyes.
"Are you going to have hot cakes?" she demanded.
"I will if you come; darned if I don't."
"We're coming, then."
It was part of the task that Peter had set himself, to persevere for
Savilla Dassonville the film of unconsciousness that lay delicately like
the bloom of a rare fruit over all that was at that moment going on in
her, that made him hasten as soon as Captain Dunham had announced
himself, to introduce her particularly by name. To forestall in the
jolly sailor the natural interpretation of their appearance together at
this hour and occasion, he had to lend himself to the only other
reasonable surmise. If they were not, as he saw it on the tip of the
good captain's tongue to propose, newly married, they were in a hopeful
way to be. The consciousness of himself as accessory to so delightful an
arrangement passed from the captain to Peter with almost the
obviousness of a wink, as he surrendered himself to the charm of the
girl's ethereal excitement.
He understood perfectly that his not being able to feel more of a drop
from the pregnant mystery of her call and his high response to it, to
the homely incident of breakfast, was due to Miss Dassonville's
obliviousness of its being one. It was for her, in fact, no drop at all
but rather as if they had pulled out for a moment into this little shoal
of neighbourly interest and comfortable food, the better to look back at
the perfect wonder of it, as from the deck of the _Merrythought_ toward
the fair front of the ducal palace and the blue domes of St. Mark's
behind the rearing lion.
Although he had parted from her that morning with no hint of an
arrangement for a next meeting, it had become a part of the day's
performance for Peter to call for the two ladies in the afternoon, so
much so that his own sense of the unusualness of finally letting the
gondola go off without him, and his particular wish at this juncture not
to mark his intercourse with any unusualness, led him to send off with
it as many roses as Luigi could find at that season on the Piazza.
Afterward, as he recalled that he had never sent flowers to Miss
Dassonville before, and as he had that morning furnished her from the
market boats past her protesting limitation, it was perhaps a greater
emphasis to his desertion.
However, it seemed that the roses and nothing but the roses might serve
as a bridge, delicate and dizzying, to support them from the realization
of their situation, into which he had no intention of letting Miss
Dassonville fall. He stayed in his room most of that afternoon, knowing
that he was shut up with a very great matter, not able to feel it so
because of the dryness of his heart, nor to think what was to be done
about it because of the lightness of his brain.
It occurred to him at last that at St. Mark's there might be reflective
silences and perhaps resolution. He felt it warm from the stored-up
veneration of the world, and though he said to himself, as he climbed to
the galleries, that it was to give himself the more room to think, he
knew that it must have been in his mind all the time that the girl was
there, as it was natural she should have come to the place where they
had met. Even before he caught the outline of her dress against the
pillar he found himself crossing over to the organ loft the better to
observe her. Knowledge reached him incredibly across the empty space, as
to what, over and above the pictured saints, she faced there in the
vault, lit so faintly by the shining of its golden walls. The service of
the benediction going on in the church below furnished him with the
figure of what came to him from her as she laid up her thoughts on an
altar before that mysterious intimation of maternity which presages in
right women the movement of passion. He felt himself caught up in it
purely above all sense of his personal insufficiency.
Back in his hotel after dinner he found he had still to let the roses
answer for him as he sat out on his balcony and realized oddly that
though he had no right to go to Miss Dassonville again until he had
thought out to its furthermost his relation to her, he could,
incontinently, think better in her company.
It was not wholly then with surprise, since he felt himself so much in
need of some compelling touch, that he heard, after an hour of futile
battling, the Princess speak to him.
She stood just beyond him in the shadow of the wistaria that went up all
the front of the balcony, and called him by his name.
"Ah," said Peter "I know now who you are. You are the one who stayed."
"How did you find out?"
"Because the one who ran away was the one he would have married."
He did not look at the Princess, but he saw the shadow of her that the
moon made, mixed with the lace of the wistaria leaves, tremble.
"Well," said she, "and what are you going to do about it?"
"You know then...?"
"I was there on the water with you this morning.... It was I that showed
you the way, but you had no eyes for anything."
It was the swift recurrent start of what he _had_ had eyes for that kept
Peter silent long enough for the Princess to have asked him again what
he was going to do about it, and then----
"The other night--with the music--she knew that I was there?"
"Oh--she!" He was taken all at once with the completeness with which in
his intimate attitude to things, Savilla did know. "She knows
everything."
"What was there so different about the other one?"
"Everything ... she was beautiful ... she was air and fire ... she made
the earth rock under me."
"And did you go to her calling?"
"I would have risen out of death and dust at her slightest word ... I
would have followed where her feet went over all the world."
"And why did you never?"
"I suppose," said Peter, "it was because she never called."
"This one," suggested the Princess, "would be prettier if she were not
so thin; and she wouldn't have to wear shirtwaists if you married her.
She makes them herself, you know. Why did the other one run away?"
"That's just the difficulty. I can't remember." He wished sincerely
within himself that he might; it seemed it would have served him somehow
with Miss Dassonville. "I've been very ill," he apologized.
"Anyway, you'd be getting what everybody wants."
"And that is----"
"A woman of your own ... understanding and care ... and children. I was
in the church with you ... you saw----"
"But I don't want to talk about it."
"What do you want then?"
"To be the prince in a fairy tale, I suppose," Peter sighed.
"Oh, you're all of that to _her_. The half god--the unmatched wonder.
When she watched your coming across the water this morning--_I_ know the
look that should go to a slayer of dragons. It seems to me," said the
Princess severely, "it is you who are running away."
She was wise enough to leave him with that view of it though it was not
by any means leaving him more comfortable. He tried for relief to
figure himself as by the Princess' suggestion, he must seem to Savilla
Dassonville. But if he was really such to her why could he not then play
the Deliverer in fact, rescue her from untended illness, from meagreness
and waste? Why not, in short, marry her, except for a reason--oh, there
was reason enough if he could only remember it!
He heard Luigi moving softly in the room behind, and presently when the
door clicked he rose and went in and taking the lamp held it high over
him, turning with it fronting the huge mirror in its gilded frame. If
there were a good reason why he couldn't marry Savilla Dassonville, he
ought to have found it in his own lean frame, the face more drawn than
was justified by his years, lined about the eyes, the hand that held the
accusing lamp broadened by labours that no scrupulosity of care denied.
Weatheral, of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., unaccomplished, unaccustomed. He
put down the lamp heavily, leaning forward in his chair as he covered
his face with his hands and groaned in them, fully remembering.
X
He had been sitting just so in his library with the lamp behind him and
the hollow flare of the coals making an excellent starting place for the
House which was now so near him that the mere exhibition in shop windows
of the stuffs with which it was being modernly renewed, was enough to
set him off for it. It was so near now, that since the announcement of
their engagement in September, he had moved through all its obligations
benumbed by the white, blinding flash thrown backward from its
consummating moment, the moment of her cry to him, of their welding at
the core of light and harmony, bounded inevitably by the approaching
date of marriage. It had been, he recalled on some one of those
occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the
Best Society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock
ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the
sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance
at the darkened doorway as the mere extension of his white-heated
fancy. The next moment as she charged into the circle of the lamp he saw
that the umbra of some strange electrical excitement hung about her. It
fairly crackled between them as he rose hurriedly to his feet.
"You have come, Eunice! You have come----"
But he saw well enough what she had come for. She laid the case on the
table, but as she tugged impatiently at her glove, the fringe of her
wrap caught the clasp of it and scattered the jewels on the cloth. She
tried then to put the ring beside them, but her hand shook so that it
fell and rolled upon the floor behind them. Peter picked it up quietly,
but he did not offer it to her hand again.
"I have come," said Eunice, "to say what in my mother's house I was
afraid of being interrupted in saying; what you must see, what my mother
won't see."
"I see you are greatly excited about something!"
"I'm not, I'm not.... That is ... I am, but not in the way you think,"
she was sharp with insistence; "that is what you and mother always say,
that I'm nervous or excited, and all the time you don't _see_."
"What is it I don't see, Eunice?"
"That I can't stand it, that I can't go on with it, that it is dreadful
to me,--_dreadful!_"
"What is dreadful?"
"Everything, being engaged--being married and giving up...." It was
fairly racked out of her by some inward torture to which he had not the
key.
"Of course, Eunice, if you don't wish to be married so soon----" Peter
was all at sea. He brought a chair for her, and perceiving that he would
go on standing as long as she did, she sat upon the edge of it but kept
both the arms as a measure of defence. The slight act of doing something
for her restored him for the moment to reality; he bent over her. "I've
never wanted to hurry you, dearest---- It shall be when you say." She
put up her hands suddenly with a shivering movement.
"Oh, never, never at all; never to you!"
Peter could feel that working its track of desolation inward, but the
first instinctive movement of his surface was to close over the wound.
He took it as he knew he could only take it: as the explosive crisis of
the virginal resistance which he remembered he had heard came to girls
when marriage loomed upon them. He took a turn down the room to steady
himself, praying dumbly for the right word.
"It isn't as if I didn't respect you"--she was eager in explanation,
hurried and stumbling--"as if I didn't know how good you are ... it is
only, because we are so different."
"How different, Eunice?"
"Oh ... older, I suppose." She grew quieter; it appeared on the whole
they were getting on. "I care for so many things, you know--dancing--and
bridge--_young_ things--and you are always reading and reading. Oh! I
couldn't stand it."
So it was out now. She was jealous of his books, a little. Well, he had
been self-absorbed. It occurred to him dimly that the thing to have done
if he had known a little more about women, had practised with them, was
to have provoked her at this point to the tears which should have sealed
the renewal of his claim to her. What he said was, very quietly:
"Of course I never meant, Eunice, that you shouldn't have everything you
want."
"Oh," she seemed to have found a suffocating quality in his gentleness,
against which she struck out with drowning gestures, "if you could only
understand what it would mean to me never to have anybody I liked to
talk to about things,--anybody I liked to be with all the time!" She was
choked and aghast at the enormity of it.
"But I thought...." Peter was not able to go on with that. "Isn't there
anybody you like to be with, Eunice?"
"Yes," said Eunice. "Burton Henderson."
Mutinous and bright she looked at him out of the chair with a hand on
either arm of it poised for flight or defence. After an interval Peter
heard his own voice out of a fog rising to the conventional utterance.
"Of course, if you have learned to love him----"
"I've loved him all the time." She was so bent on making this clear to
him that she was careless what went down before her. "From the very
beginning," she said, "but he had so little money, and mother ... I
promised you, I know, but it's not as if I ever said I loved you."
She should have spared him that! He had not put out a hand to hold her
that he should be so pierced through with needless cruelty. But she was
bent on clearing her skirts of him.
"Do you think," she expostulated to his stricken silence, "that if I'd
cared in the least I'd have made it so easy for you? Can't you see that
it was all arranged, that we _jumped_ at you?" All the time she sat
opposite him, thrusting swift and hard, there was no diminution of her
appealing beauty, the flaming rose of her cheeks and the soft, dark
flare of her hair. As if she felt how it belied at every turn the
quality of her unyielding intention, her voice railed against him
feverishly. "I suppose you think I'm mercenary, and I thought I was,
too. You don't know how people like us _need_ money sometimes. All the
things we like _cost_ so--all the real things. And poor mamma, she
needed things; she'd never had them, and I thought that I could stand
being married to you if I could get them that way.... Maybe I could,
you know, if you'd been different, more like us I mean. But there was
such a lot you didn't understand ... things you hadn't even heard about.
I found that out as soon as we were engaged. There wasn't a thing
between us; not a _thing_."
It poured scalding hot on Peter's sensitive surfaces: made sensitive by
the way in which even in this hour her beauty moved him. He felt tears
starting in his heart and prayed they might not come to his face. "So
you see as we hadn't anything in common it would be better for us not to
go on with it even"--she broke a little at this--"even if there hadn't
been anybody else. You see that, don't you?" She dared him to deny it
rather than begged the concession of him as she gathered herself for
departure.
"I see that."
"You never really belonged to our set, you know----" She rose now and he
rose blindly with her; he hoped that she was done, but there was
something still. "It hasn't been easy to go through with it.... Mother
isn't going to make it any easier. It's natural for her to want me to
have everything that money would mean, and I thought that if you would
just keep away from her ... you owe something to Burton and me for what
we've been through, I think ... just leave it to me to manage in my own
way...."
"I shall never trouble you, Eunice."
He came close to her then to open the door, seeing that she was to leave
him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony
bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching
for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the
remotest implication of the situation. She found at last the barbedest.
All the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for
Peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as
that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places.
"It isn't as if I had ever loved you; I owe it to Mr. Henderson to
remind you that I never said I did.... You know I never liked to have
you kiss me."
He had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of Eunice
Goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little
to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it--days when he
would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he
had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty
that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his. The
sharp edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his
manhood. Never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream
again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the
meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and Ellen had
obliged him to present to destiny. She had beggared him of all those
aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept
himself inwardly alive. The capacity for loving died in him with the
knowledge of not being able to be loved.
Out of the anaesthesia of exhaustion from which Italy had revived him, it
rolled back upon him that by just the walled imperviousness that shut
Eunice Goodward from the appreciation of his passion, he was prevented
now from Savilla Dassonville.
XI
It was odd, then, having come to this conclusion in the middle of the
night, that when he joined the ladies in the morning he should have
experienced a sinking pang in not being able any longer to be sure what
Miss Dassonville thought of him. There was in her manner, as she thanked
him for the flowers, nothing to ruffle the surface of the bright,
impersonal companionship which she had afforded him for weeks past.
The occasion which brought them together was an agreement entered into
some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past
the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had
not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the
morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of
leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal
of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that such a
flight implied.
It came out a little later, perhaps, when after traversing many high and
resounding marble halls, with a great many rooms opening into one
another in a way that suggested rather the avoidance of privacy than its
security, they found themselves in one of those gardens of shut delight
of which the exteriors of Venetian houses give so little intimation.
As she went about from bough to bough of the neglected roses, turned all
inward as if they took their florescence from that still lighted human
passion which had found its release and centre there, her face glowed
for the moment with the colour of her quick sympathies. She turned it on
him with an unconscious, tender confidence, which not to meet seemed to
Peter, in that gentle enclosure full of warmth and fragrance, to assume
the proportions of a betrayal.
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