VENICE
THE instructions for which I was waiting did not reach me for three
days: I found reason to suspect, later on, that bribery had been at
work; they had almost certainly been delayed, copied, and communicated
to enemy quarters. The bulk of these enforcedly idle hours I spent with
Lucinda—at the restaurant, on the sea-front, once or twice at my hotel,
but never in the little house where she had a room: I often escorted
her to the door, but she never asked me in. But we grew intimate; she
told, I think, all, or almost all, the story, though often still with
the air of examining herself, or of rendering an account to herself,
rather than of being anxious to tell me: sometimes she would seem even
to forget my presence. At other points, however, she would appeal
directly to me, even urgently, as though she hung on my verdict. These
changes gave variety and life to her story; one saw her living again
through all her moods and experiences: on the other hand, it cannot be
denied that they lengthened the narrative.
In the spring of 1913—the spring after their visit to Cragsfoot—her
mother and Lucinda went to stay on the top floor but one in Arsenio
Valdez’s palazzo at Venice, Valdez himself inhabiting the attics
immediately above them. Poverty, the satirist remarked long ago, has
no harsher incident than that of making people ridiculous; it may have
worse moral effects. Mrs. Knyvett had not so much accepted Valdez’s
invitation as intrigued and cadged for it; and they stayed rent free,
though even then Valdez was by no means a well-to-do man. And Mrs.
Knyvett could not receive favors in the grand manner. She took, but
she took cringingly; she over-acknowledged, constantly by manner and
even by word, reminding the donor and herself of the gift, reminding
her daughter also. She did not, it is true, know about the kiss in the
garden at Cragsfoot; Lucinda kept that to herself; her view was that in
her mother’s hands it would have been another lever. “Arsenio lodged us
free as it was; if mother had known that, she’d have made him board us
too!” Even as it was, he seemed to have entertained them a good deal
(as was only natural) while he played _cicerone_, showing them the
sights and pleasures of the place.
It was by no means Mrs. Knyvett’s intention or desire that her daughter
should marry Arsenio. Her ambition flew higher. Cragsfoot was to her
still the most eligible prospect or project which had so far presented
itself; she kept in touch with it by letters to Aunt Bertha; in them
she angled for another invitation there, just as she had cadged for
Arsenio’s invitation to the palazzo. How many invitations does a
charming daughter “make” in the arithmetic of genteel poverty? Arsenio
was quite aware of her attitude towards him, but it pleased his
monkeyish humor to pretend to believe that she favored a suit which
he had himself no intention of pressing. Arsenio could not afford to
marry a poor girl, and probably did not want to marry at all. His
taste was for a bachelor life, and his affairs were in a precarious
state. He could hardly be said to live by gambling; he existed in
spite of it—in a seesaw between prosperity and penury; as such men do,
he splashed his _lire_ about when he had them; when he was “cleaned
out,” he would disappear from the ken of the Knyvetts for a day or
two, engaged in “milking” sundry old and aristocratic friends of his
father, who still resided at Venice in a stately and gloomy seclusion,
and could be persuaded to open their not very fat purses to help a
gentleman of Spain who upheld the Legitimist principle, as we know—from
past events—that Arsenio did! No, he certainly did not intend at the
beginning of their visit to mate poverty to poverty.
But—there was Lucinda! Lucinda under blue skies by day and soft
moonlight by night. There was that secret memory between them, the
meeting of their lips; for him an incentive to gallantry, almost an
obligation, according to his code; for her, more subtly, a tie, a
union that she could not lightly nor wholly disown. He did not speak
of it directly, but he would circle round it in talk, and smile in an
impish exchange of the unspoken memory; he would laugh at Waldo, while
with feigned sincerity he praised his sterling qualities. “Oh, his
reliability, his English steadiness—dear, good, old Waldo! You’d trust
him—even in a gondola, Lucinda!”
The gondola! Let it stand for the whole of Venice’s romantic
paraphernalia; an old theme, a picture painted a thousand times. No
need to expatiate on it here. To him it was all very familiar—the
nearest thing he had to a home; to her, of course, it was a revelation.
They were both susceptible to impressions, to beauty. He retained his
sensibility, she developed hers. She saw new things through his eyes;
he saw old ones newly reflected in the light of hers. His feelings
regained freshness, while hers grew to maturity—a warm ripeness in
which the man and the place were fused together in one glowing whole.
“Oh, I lived then!” she cried, clasping her hands together and beating
them upon her knee.
Yet it must still have been with her own aloofness, delicacy,
difficulty of approach; the fires gleamed through the veil, but the
veil was round them. He complained, it appeared, of her coldness, of
the distance at which she kept him, at relapses into formality after
hours of unreserved merriment. Mrs. Knyvett chid her; was he not the
friend, the host, the benefactor? Within prudent bounds he should be
handsomely encouraged—and rewarded. “Mother told me that well-bred
girls knew how to make themselves respected without being prudish.”
Maternal philosophy of an affectionately utilitarian order—one eye on
present amenities, the other on grander prospects in the future!
But was there no fear also in that maternal breast? Did the situation
and the actors raise no apprehension? To some people—to how many? Some
have maintained to all!—morality is not a master, but a good and ever
vigilant servant. It preserves the things that are of real value, the
marketable stuff. And it dignifies its watch and ward with such high
names, such sacred and binding traditions, that—well, really, what
between the august sanctions on the one hand and the enormous material
advantages on the other, can it be dreamt of that any reasonable girl
will forget herself? So one may suppose that Mrs. Knyvett reasoned. For
what, after all, is the “leading article” in a girl’s stock-in-trade?
Who, properly instructed, would sell that under market price, and so
stand bankrupt?
So much may be said in apology for Mrs. Knyvett’s blindness to her
daughter’s peril; for in peril she was. Then an apology is needed for
Arsenio? It would show a lack of humor to tender it; it is the last
thing which those who have known and liked Monkey Valdez would think
of doing. He was a “good Catholic” by tradition, and a gentleman by
breeding; but he was an honest man only by fits and starts—when honesty
appealed to his histrionic sense, when it afforded him the chance of
a _beau geste_, when he felt himself under the eyes of the men with
whom he had been brought up, who expect honesty even in dealings with
women—at all events, with girls of their own caste; who draw a broad
distinction between an intrigue and a seduction; who are, in fact (not
to labor the subject), born and trained adepts in the niceties, some of
them curious, of the code of honor, which is certainly not a religious
rule or an ethical system, but may be considered to embody the laws of
sex warfare, to be a Hague Convention between the sexes.
Yet there is no need to picture the poor Monkey as the deliberate
villain of the stage. Your true villain must be deliberate and must
rejoice in his villainy, or all the salt is out of him. Arsenio was
certainly not deliberate, and in no way realized himself as a villain.
The event—the course of affairs afterwards—proves that. He probably let
his boat drift pleasantly, delightfully, down the river, till the swirl
of rapids caught it; it is likely that he was himself surprised; the
under-nature stormed the hesitating consciousness.
She gave me no particulars; I asked for none. She shrank from them, as
I did. It was after a delightful evening alone together, on the water,
that it came. Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed; they were alone, full of
the attraction of each other—and of “it all.” So Lucinda summed up the
notoriously amatory influences of the Adriatic’s Queen. She appealed
to me—woman now, to a man of middle age—to understand how it happened.
As she told me—well, she hardly told me, she let me see—she laid her
hand in mine, her eyes sought mine, straight, in question—yet hardly
to me—rather to some tribunal which she blindly sought, to which she
made a puzzled but not despairing, not altogether too tragic, appeal:
“At Cragsfoot he had kissed my lips, you know; and I wasn’t angry. That
meant I liked him, didn’t it? That meant——? That meant—the same?”
That seemed to me to record—as she, saying it, still seemed to retain—a
wonderful freedom from the flesh. She judged things by the spirit.
A terribly dangerous criterion; anybody can distort it; anybody may
snigger at it—though I think that it offers more resistance to an
honest laugh. There is a sort of pathos about it. Meant the same!
Poor dear! The gulf between the two things! Immeasurable! Let speak
religion (though there perhaps the voices have varied), morality,
prudence, the rest of them! And virgin modesty? Shall we lay its fall
most essentially in the less or the greater—in the parley or in the
surrender? That’s what she seemed to ask. But what answer could a plain
man of the world give her?
She had a few—a very few days of happiness, of forgetfulness of
everything except their love. Then the clouds gathered. She waited
for a word from him that did not come—not the first time that he
had kept her thus waiting—yet how different! Arsenio grew fretful,
disconsolate, and sometimes sullen. One of his disappearances occurred;
he was raising the wind among his long-suffering aristocrats; he was
scraping together every coin he could and throwing them all on the
gaming table. If fortune smiled, he would do the right thing, and do
it handsomely; if she frowned—and there could be no doubt that she
was frowning now—what lay before him, before them? A scamped and mean
_ménage à trois_, existence eked out with the aid of Mrs. Knyvett’s
scanty resources, and soured by her laments! No money for gayety, for
play, to cut a figure with! He shrank from the prospect. He could not
trust his love with it; probably he did not trust hers either. He began
to draw away from her; she would not reproach or beseech. “I had taken
the chances; I had gambled too,” she said.
Unless something had happened which put Arsenio under an even more
imperative obligation—one which, as I would fain believe, he must
have honored—it seems probable that the affair would in any case have
ended as it did; but the actual manner of its ending was shaped by an
external incident.
The two were sitting together one morning in the Knyvett _salon_,
Lucinda mending her gloves, Arsenio doing nothing and saying nothing,
melancholy and fagged after a bout of gambling the night before. Mrs.
Knyvett came in, with an air of triumph, holding a letter in her hand.
She was still ignorant of the situation; still sure that her daughter
was making herself respected—though surely less apprehensive of her
prudishness? And, while they had been pursuing their devices, she had
had hers also to pursue. Success had crowned her efforts. The letter
was from “dearest Miss Fleming”; it invited mother and daughter to pay
another visit to herself and Sir Paget as soon as they returned to
England; that is, in about six weeks; for they had a stay with friends
in Paris arranged in the immediate future—a thing that had already
begun to trouble Lucinda.
“It’s delightful!” said Mrs. Knyvett. “Won’t it help us splendidly
through the summer! Any chance of your being there too, Don Arsenio?
That would make it perfect!”
The good lady did not stay for an answer. She had her hat on, and was
going out to do her marketing. She laid the letter down on the table
between them, and bustled out, her face still radiant with the joy of
successful maneuver.
So Cragsfoot, completely forgotten of recent days, made its reëntry on
the scene.
For a few moments they sat silent still, with the letter between
them. Then Lucinda said, “What are we to do, Arsenio?” She raised her
eyes from her sewing and looked across at him. He did not return her
glance; he was scowling. The invitation to Cragsfoot (he did not know
about the French visit, which Mrs. Knyvett could readily have put off
if she had preferred to stay on at Venice) brought him up short; it
presented him with an issue. It forced Lucinda’s hand also. No mere
excuse, no mere plea of disinclination, would prevent Mrs. Knyvett from
going to Cragsfoot and taking her daughter with her. To stay there was
not only a saving and a luxury, in her eyes it was also prestige—and a
great possibility!
“Damn Cragsfoot!” she heard him mutter. And then he laid his head
between his hands on the table and began positively to sob. How much
for unsuccessful gambling, how much for too successful love, Heaven
knows! But Monkey Valdez sobbed.
She put down her work, went round to the back of his chair, and put her
arms about his neck. “I know, I know, Arsenio. Don’t be so miserable,
dear. I understand. And—and there’s no harm done. You only loved me too
much—and if you can’t do what—what I know you want to do——”
He raised his head and said (in what she called “a dead voice”), “I’m
what he called me, that’s the truth. He called me a dirty Spaniard; he
said no English gentleman would do what I did. The night I kissed you
at Cragsfoot! Waldo!”
“He said that to you? He told you that? Waldo? Oh, I knew he was very
angry; but you’ve never told me that he said that.”
“Then,” said Lucinda, as she told her story to me, “I did something,
or said something, that seemed to make him suddenly angry. What he
repeated—what Waldo had said—somehow struck me with a queer sense of
puzzle. It seemed to put him and Waldo back into the same sort of
conflict—or, at least, contrast—that I had seen them in at Cragsfoot.
I didn’t, of course, accept the ‘dirty Spaniard’ part; Waldo was just
angry when he said that. But the words did bring Waldo back to my
mind—over against Arsenio, so to speak. I don’t know whether you’ve
ever noticed that I sometimes fall into what they call a brown study? I
get thinking things over, and rather forget that I’m talking to people.
I wasn’t angry with Arsenio; I was feeling sorry for him; I loved him
and wanted to comfort him. But I had to think over what he had told
me—not only (perhaps not so much) as it bore on Arsenio, but as it bore
on myself—on what I had done and felt, and—and allowed, you know. Well,
Arsenio suddenly called out, quite angrily, ‘You needn’t pull your arms
away like that!’ I had done it, but I hadn’t been conscious of doing
it; I didn’t think about it even then. I was thinking of him—and Waldo.
And I know that I was smiling, as the old Cragsfoot days came back to
me. I wasn’t thinking in the least about where my arms were! ‘Of course
you and Waldo are curiously different,’ I said.
“He jumped to his feet as if I had struck him, and broke out in a
torrent of accusation against me. A few minutes before he had himself
said that Waldo had told the truth about him. Now he declared that
it was I who had said it. I hadn’t said anything of the sort—at all
events, meant anything of the sort. I suppose I was sore in my heart,
but I should never have said a word. But he would have it that I had
meant it. He talked very fast, he never stopped. And—I must tell
you the truth, Julius—it all seemed rather ridiculous to me, rather
childish. I believe that I listened to most of it smiling—oh, not a
merry smile, but a smile all the same. I was waiting for him to work
himself out, to run down; it was no good trying to interrupt. And all
the time the contrast was in my mind—between him and Waldo, between
Waldo’s anger and—this! I felt as I suppose a woman feels towards her
naughty child; I wanted to scold and to kiss him both at once. I even
thought of that wicked nickname that Waldo has for him! At last—after
a great deal of it—he dashed one hand through his hair, thumped the
table with the other, and flung out at me, ‘Then go to him! Go to your
English gentleman! Leave me in the gutter, where I belong!’ And he
rushed out of the room. I heard his steps pattering up the stone stairs
to his own floor.”
“You must have been terribly distressed,” I said—or something formal of
that kind.
“No. I didn’t believe that anything had really happened. I waited half
an hour to let him cool down. But Mother might be back every minute;
there was still that question about Cragsfoot! I had to have some
answer! I went up to his apartment and knocked. I got no answer. I went
down to Amedeo the _portière_, and he told me that Arsenio had gone
out ten minutes before—I hadn’t heard his footsteps coming down again,
he must have stolen down softly; he was carrying a bag, had a gondola
called, and went off in the direction of the station, saying that he
would be back in a few days. That was the end of—Venice!”
She came to a stop, gently strumming her fingers on the arm of her
chair. On an impulse I leant forward and asked her a question: “Are you
Madame Valdez now, Lucinda?”
“Donna Lucinda Valdez, at your service, sir! Since the day after you
saw me in the taxi.”
“Then he must have explained—Venice?”
“Never. From the first day that we met again, we have never mentioned
Venice.” She touched my arm for a moment. “I rather like that. It seems
to me rather a tactful apology, Julius. He began courting me all afresh
when he came to England. At least he took it up from where it had
stopped at Cragsfoot.”
“It may be tactful; it’s also rather convenient,” I commented gruffly.
“It avoids explanations.”
A gleam of amusement lit up her eyes. “Poor Arsenio! He was in a
difficulty—in a corner. And he’d been losing, his nerves were terribly
wrong. There was the question of—me! And the question of Cragsfoot!
And then Waldo came into it—oh, I’m sure of that. Those two men—it’s
very odd. They seem fated to—to cross one another—to affect one another
sometimes. I wonder whether——!” She broke off, knitting her brow. “He
sounded most genuine in that outbreak of his when he mentioned Waldo.
I think he was somehow realizing what Waldo would think and say, if he
knew about Venice. Perhaps so, perhaps not! As for the rest of it——”
“You think he wasn’t quite as angry as he pretended to be?”
She seemed to reflect for a moment. “I didn’t say his anger was unreal,
did I? I said it was childish. When a child runs heedlessly into
something and hurts himself, he kicks the thing and tells his mother
that it’s horrid. I was the thing, you see. Arsenio’s half a child.”
Again she paused. “He’s also an actor. And he contrived, on the whole,
a pretty effective exit!”
“That you ever let him come back again is the wonder!” I cried.
“No. It’s what happened before he came back that puzzles me,” she said.