The Lovely Lady

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"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 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.

"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 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?"

"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."

"Oh!" said Peter.

"It is a very little way to the San Georgio," volunteered Luigi as they
remained, master and man, looking down into the water in the leisurely
Venetian fashion. "Across the Piazza," said Luigi, "a couple of turns, a
bridge or two and there you are;" and after a long pause, "_The signore_
is looking very well this morning. Exercise in the sea air is excellent
for the health."

"Very," said Peter. "I shall go for a walk, I think. I shall not need
you, Luigi."

Nevertheless Luigi did not lose sight of him until he was well on his
way to Saint George of the Sclavoni which announced itself by the
ramping fat dragon over the door. There was the young knight riding him
down as of old, and still no Princess.

"She must be somewhere on the premises," said Peter to himself. "No
doubt she has preserved the traditions of her race by remaining
indoors." He had not, however, accustomed his eyes to the dusk of the
little room when he heard at the landing the scrape of the gondola and
the voices of the women disembarking.

"If we'd known you wanted to come," explained Mrs. Merrithew heartily,
"we could have brought you in the boat." That was the way she oftenest
spoke of it, and other times it was the gon_do_la.

Peter explained his old acquaintance with the charging saint and his
curiosity about the lady, but when the custodian had brought a silver
paper screen to gather the little light there was upon the mellow old
Carpaccio, he looked upon her with a vague dissatisfaction.

"It's the same dragon and the same young man," he admitted. "I know him
by the hair and by the determined expression. But I'm not sure about the
young lady."

"You are looking for a fairy-tale Princess," Miss Dassonville declared,
"but you have to remember that the knight didn't marry this one; he only
made a Christian of her."

They came back to it again when they had looked at all the others and
speculated as to whether Carpaccio knew how funny he was when he painted
Saint Jerome among the brethren, and whether in the last picture he was
really in heaven as Ruskin reported.

"So you think," said Peter, "she'd have been more satisfactory if the
painter had thought Saint George meant to marry her?"

"More personal and convincing," the girl maintained.

"There's one in the Belle Arti that's a lot better looking to my
notion," contributed Mrs. Merrithew.

"Oh, but that Princess is running away," the girl protested.

"It's what any well brought up young female would be expected to do
under the circumstances," declared the elder lady; "just look at them
fragments. It's enough to turn the strongest."

"It does look a sort of 'After the Battle,'" Peter admitted. "But I
should like to see the other one," and he fell in very readily with Mrs.
Merrithew's suggestion that he should come in the gondola with them and
drop into the Academy on the way home. They found the Saint George with
very little trouble and sat down on one of the red velvet divans,
looking a long time at the fleeing lady.

"And you think," said Peter, "she would not have run away?"

"I think she shouldn't; when it's done for her."

"But isn't that--the running away I mean--the evidence of her being
worth doing it for, of her fineness, of her superior delicacy?"

"Well," Miss Dassonville was not disposed to take it lightly, "if a
woman has a right to a fineness that's bought at another's expense. They
can't all run away, you know, and I can't think it right for a woman to
evade the disagreeable things just because some man makes it possible."

"I believe," laughed Peter, "if you had been the Princess you would have
killed the dragon yourself. You'd have taken a little bomb up your
sleeve and thrown it at him." He had to take that note to cover a
confused sense he had of the conversation being more pertinent than he
could at that moment remember a reason for its being.

"Oh, I've been delivered to the dragons before now," she said. "It's
going on all the time." She moved a little away from the picture as if
to avoid the personal issue.

"What beats me," commented Mrs. Merrithew, "is that there has to be a
young lady. You'd think a likely young man, if he met one of them
things, would just kill it on general principles, the same as a snake or
a spider."

"Oh," said Peter, "it's chiefly because they are terrifying to young
ladies that we kill them at all. Yes, there has to be a young lady." He
was aware of an accession of dreariness in the certainty that in his
case there never could be a young lady. But Miss Dassonville as she
began to walk toward the entrance gave it another turn.

"There _is_ always a young lady. The difficulty is that it must be a
particular one. No one takes any account of those who were eaten up
before the Princess appeared."

"But you must grant," said Peter, with an odd sense of defending his own
position, "that when one got done with a fight like that, one would be
entitled to something particular."

"Oh, if it came as a reward," she laughed. "But nowadays we've reversed
the process. One makes sure of the Princess first, lest when the dragon
is killed she should prove to have gone away with one of the
bystanders."

Something that clicked in Peter's mind led him to look sharply from one
to the other of the two women. In Bloombury they had a way, he knew, of
not missing any point of their neighbours' affairs, but their faces
expressed no trace of an appreciation of anything in the subject being
applicable to his. The flick of memory passed and left him wondering why
it should be.

He caught himself looking covertly at the girl as the gondola swung into
open water, to discover in her the springs of an experience such as lay
at the source of his own desolation. He perceived instead under her
slight appearance a certain warmth and colour like a light behind a
breathed-on window-pane. Illness, overwork, whatever dragon's breath had
dimmed her surfaces, she gave the impression of being inwardly
inexhaustibly alight and alive. Something in her leaped to the day, to
the steady pacing of the gondola on the smooth water tessellated by the
sun in blue and bronze and amber, to the arched and airy palaces that
rose above it.

The awning was up; there was strong sun and pleasant wind: from hidden
gardens they smelled the oleanders. Peter felt the faint stir of
rehabilitation like the breath of passing presences.

The mood augmented in him as he drifted late that evening on the lagoon
beyond the Guidecca, after the sun was gone down and the sea and the sky
reflected each to each, one roseate glow like a hollow shell of pearl.
Lit peaks of the Alps ranged in the upper heaven, and nearer the great
dome of the Saluti signalled whitely; below them, all the islands near
and far floated in twilit blueness on the flat lagoon. There was by
times, a long sea swell, and no sound but the tread of the oar behind
like a woman's silken motion. It drew with it films of recollection in
which his mood suspended like gossamer, a mood capable of going on
independently of his idea of himself as a man cut off from those
experiences, intimations of which pressed upon him everywhere by line
and form and colour.

It had come back, the precious intimacy of beauty, with that fullness
sitting there in the gondola, he realized with the intake of the breath
to express it and the curious throbbing of the palms to grasp. He was
able to identify in his bodily response to all that charged the decaying
wonder of Venice with opulent personality, the source of his boyish
dreams. It was no woman, he told himself, who had gone off with the
bystanders while he had been engaged with the dragons of poverty and
obligation, but merely the appreciations of beauty. There had never been
any woman, there was never going to be. He began to plan how he should
explain his discovery and the bearing of it, to Miss Dassonville. It
would be a pity if she were making the same mistake about it. He leaned
back in the cushioned seat and watched the silver shine of the prow
delicately peering out its way among the shadowy islands; lay so still
and absorbed that he did not know which way they went nor what his
gondolier inquired of him, and presently realized without surprise that
the Princess was speaking to him.

He felt her first, warm and friendlily, and then he heard her laughing.
He knew she was the Princess though she had no form or likeness.

"But which are you?" he whispered to the laughter.

"The right one."

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

"Oh, if you don't know by this time! I have come to take you to the
House."

"Are you the one who was always there?"

"The Lovely Lady; there was never any other."

"And shall I go there as I used?" asked Peter, "and be happy there?"

"You are free to go; do you not feel it?"

"Oh, here--I feel many things. I am just beginning to understand how I
came to lose the way to it."

"Are you so sure?"

"Quite." Peter's new-found certainty was strong in him. "I made the
mistake of thinking that the House was the House of Love, and it is
really the House of Beauty. I thought if I found the one to love, I
should live in it forever. But now that I have found the way back to it
I see that was a mistake."

"How did you find it?"

"Well, there is a girl here----"

"Ah!" said the Princess.

"She is young," Peter explained; "she looks at things the way I used to,
and that somehow brought me around to the starting-point again."

"I see," said the Princess; the look she turned on him was full of a
strange, secret intelligence which as he returned it without knowing
what it was about, afforded Peter the greatest satisfaction. "Do you
know me now," she said at last, "which one I am?"

"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
spacious 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-shore 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 Dassonville. 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 Dassonville 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 Dassonville'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 Dassonville 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 Dassonville. 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 Dassonville 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 nobody," 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 glass things, the way I have to sit
still and see Providence dealing with Savilla Dassonville. 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 easement 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 Dassonville 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 attitude. 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 Dassonville 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 passed the palace of Camerleigh. The jewel-fruited arbour
folded and furled upon itself to pass 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.

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