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 anæsthesia 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.
He did meet it there as she came back to him for the last look from the
marble balustrade by which they had descended, covering her hand, there
resting, lingeringly with his own. He was awakened only to the
implication of this movement by the discovery that she had deeply and
exquisitely blushed.
It was a further singularity in view of the conviction with which Peter
had come through the night, that the mood of protectingness which the
girl provoked in him should have multiplied itself in pointing out to
him how many ways, if he had not made up his mind not to marry her at
all, such a marriage could be made to serve its primal uses. She had
turned up her cuff to trail her hand overside as they slid through the
lucent water, and the pretty feminine curve of it had brought to mind
what the Princess had told him of the shirt-waists she made herself. He
decided that she made them very well. But she was too thin for their
severity--and if he married her he would have insisted on her wearing
them now and then as a tender way to prevent her suspecting that it was
on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed
whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though
her mind had played into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had
been always, as regards her person, a little prim with him, had lent to
their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly
apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of the _Merrythought_ at
the door of the Consulate. Mr. Weatheral had some papers which Lessing
had sent him to acknowledge there, and it was a piece of the morning's
performance, when he had come back from that business, to find that the
meeting had taken on--from some mutual discovery of the captain's and
Mrs. Merrithew's of a cousin's wife's sister who had married one of the
Applegates who was a Dunham on the mother's side--quite the aspect of a
family party. It came in the end to the four of them going off at
Peter's invitation to have lunch together in a café overhanging the
_calle_. He told himself afterward that he would not have done it if he
had recalled in time the friendly seaman's romantic appreciation of the
situation between himself and Miss Dassonville. He saw himself so
intrigued by it that, by the time lunch was over, he felt himself in a
position which to his own sensitiveness, demanded that he must
immediately leave Venice or propose to Miss Dassonville. To see the way
he was going and to go on in it, had for him the fascination of the
abyss. He caught himself in the act even of trying to fix Miss
Dassonville's eye to include her by complicity in the beguilement of the
captain, a business which she seemed to have undertaken on her own
account on quite other grounds. He perceived with a kind of pride for
her that she had the ways of elderly sea-going gentlemen by heart. It
was something even if she had failed to charm Peter, that she shouldn't
be found quite wanting in it by other men.
When they had put him back aboard of the _Merrythought_ they had come to
such a pitch among them all, that as the captain leaned above the rail
to launch an invitation, he addressed it to Miss Dassonville, as, if not
quite the giver of the feast, the mistress of the situation.
"When are you coming to lunch with me?" demanded the captain.
"Never!" declared Miss Dassonville. "It would be quite out of the
question to have hot cakes for luncheon, and I absolutely refuse to
come for anything less."
"There's something quite as good," asserted the captain, "that I'll bet
you haven't had in as long."
"Better than hot cakes?" Miss Dassonville was skeptical.
"Pie," said the captain.
"Oh, _Pie!_" in mock ecstasy. "Well, I'd come for pie," and with that
they parted.
Peter had plenty of time for considering where he found himself that
afternoon, for the ladies were bent on a shopping expedition on which
they had rather pointedly given him to understand he was not expected to
attend. He had tried that once, and had hit upon the excellent device,
in face of the outrageous prices proposed by the dealers, of having them
settle upon what they would like and sending Luigi back to bargain for
it. All of which would have gone very well if Mrs. Merrithew, in the
delight of his amazing success, had not gone back to the shop the next
day to duplicate his purchases. Peter had never heard what occurred on
that occasion, but he had noticed that they never talked in his
presence of buying anything again. Bloombury people, he should have
remembered, had perfectly definite notions about having things done for
them.
He walked, therefore, on this afternoon in the Public Gardens and tried
to reconstruct in their original force the reasons for his not marrying
Savilla Dassonville. They had come upon him overwhelmingly in the
recrudescence of memory, reasons rooted very simply in his man's hunger
for the lift, the dizzying eminence of desire. He liked the girl well
enough but he did not want her as he had wanted Eunice Goodward, as he
wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody--who was
not Eunice--he was perfectly clear on this point--but should be in a
measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in
so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice
had forced upon him. He was there between the dark and dawn, and here
again in the cool of the garden, to taste the full bitterness of the
conviction that he was not good enough to be loved. He was not to be
helped from that by the thought, which came hurrying on the heels of
the other, that Savilla Dassonville loved him. He had a moment of almost
hating her as she seemed to plead with him, by no motion of her own he
was obliged to confess for those raptures, leaping fires, winged rushes,
which should have been his portion of their situation.
He hated her for the certainty that if he went away now quietly without
saying anything, it would be to visit on her undeservedly all that had
come to him from Eunice. For she would know; she would not, as he had
been, be blind to the point of requiring the spoken word. If he left her
now it would be to the unavoidable knowledge that, as the Princess had
said of him, he would be running away. He would be running from the
evidences of a moneyless, self-abnegating youth, from the plain surfaces
of efficiency and womanliness, not hedged about and enfolded, but pushed
to the extremity of its use. He had, however, when he had taken that in
from every side, the grace to be ashamed of it.
He was ashamed, too, of finding himself at their next meeting involved
in a wordless appeal to be helped from his state to some larger grounds.
If the girl had but appealed to him he could have done with a fine
generosity what he felt was beyond him to invite. He could have married
Savilla Dassonville to be kind to her; what he didn't enjoy was putting
it on a basis of her being kind to him.
Miss Dassonville, however, afforded him no help beyond the negative one
of not talking too much and taking perhaps a shade less interest in
Venice. They had two quiet days together in which it was evident,
whatever Peter settled with himself as to his relation to the girl, it
had taken on for Mrs. Merrithew the pointedness known in Bloombury as
"attentions." She paid in to the possibilities of the situation the
tribute of her absence for long sessions in which, so far as Peter could
discover, the situation rather fell to the ground. It began to appear
that he had missed as he was doomed with women, the crucial instant, and
was to come out of this as of other encounters, empty. And then quite
suddenly the girl put out a hand to him.
It was along about the end of the afternoon they had come out of the
church of Saint George the Greater, which as being most accessible had
been left to the latter end of their explorations. Mrs. Merrithew had
just sent Giuseppe back for a shawl which she had dropped in the
cloister. They sat rocking in the gondola looking toward the fairy
arcade of the ducal palace and the pillars of the saints, and suddenly
Miss Dassonville spoke to excuse her quietness.
"I must look all I can," she said; "we are leaving the day after
to-morrow."
If she had retired behind Mrs. Merrithew's comfortable breadth in order
to deliver her shot the more effectively, she missed seeing how plumply
it landed in the midst of Peter's defences and scattered them.
"Leaving Venice?" he said. "Leaving me?" It took a moment for that fact,
dropping the depth of his indecision, to show him where he stood. "But I
thought you understood," he protested, "that I wanted you to stay ... to
stay with me...." He leaned across Mrs. Merrithew's broad lap in a great
fear of not being sufficiently plain. "Make her understand," he said,
"that I want her to stay always."
"I guess," said Mrs. Merrithew, a dry smile twinkling in the placidity
of her countenance, "you'd better take me right home first, and then you
can explain to her yourself."
XII
"And you are sure," asked Peter, "that you are not going to mind my
being so much older?"
"Oh, I'm going to mind it: There will be times when I shall be afraid of
not living up to it. But the most part of my minding will be, since you
are so much better acquainted with life than I am, that in any matter in
which we shouldn't agree I shall be so much the more sure of your being
right. It's going to be a great help to us, having something like that
to go by."
"Oh," said Peter, "you put it very prettily, my dear."
He was aware as soon as he had said it, that she would have a way always
of putting things prettily, and that not for the sake of any
prettiness, but because it was so intrinsically she saw them. It would
make everything much simpler that she was always sufficiently to be
believed.
"It isn't, you know," she went on, "as if I should have continually to
prop up my confidence with my affection as I might with a man of less
experience. Oh!" she threw out her arms with a beautiful upward motion,
"you give me so much room, Peter."
"Well, more than I would give you at this moment if we were not in a
gondola on a public highway!"
He amazed himself at the felicity with which during the three days of
their engagement he had been able to take that note with her, still more
at the entertainment of her shy response. It gave him a new and enlarged
perception of himself as a man acquainted with passion. All that had
been withheld from him, by the mere experience of missing, he was able
to bestow with largesse. The witchery and charm that had been done on
him, he worked--if he were but to put his arm about her now, to draw
her so that her head rested on his shoulder, with a certain pressure,
he could feel all her being flower delicately to that beguilement. He
had promised himself, when he had her promise, that she should never
miss anything, and he had a certain male satisfaction in being able to
make good. What he did now, in deference to their being as they were in
the full light of day and the plying traffic, was to say:
"Then if I were to put it to you in the light of my superior experience,
that I considered it best for us to be married right away, I shouldn't
expect you to contradict me."
"Oh, Peter!"
"We can't keep Mrs. Merrithew on forever, you know," he suggested, "and
we've such a lot to do--there's Greece and Egypt and the Holy Land----"
"But can we--be married in Venice, I mean?"
"That," said Peter, "is what I'm waiting your permission to find out."
He spent the greater part of the afternoon at that business without,
however, getting satisfaction. "Marriage in Italy," the consul told
him, "is a sort of world-without-end affair. Even if you cable for the
necessary papers it will be a matter of a month or six weeks before the
ceremony could be accomplished. You'll do better to go to Switzerland
with the young lady."
For the present he went back to her with a list of the required
certificates, and another item which he brought out later as a
corrective for the disappointment for the first.
"My birth and baptismal certificates? I haven't any," said Miss
Dassonville, "and I don't believe you have either; and I don't want to
go to Switzerland."
"No," said Peter, "even that takes three weeks."
"Why can't he marry us himself--the consul, I mean? I thought wherever
the flag went up was territory of the United States."
"If you will come along with me in the morning we can ask him," Peter
suggested, and on the way there he loosed for her benefit the second
item of his yesterday's discovery. They slid past the façade of a
certain palace and she kissed the tip of her finger to it lightly. "It's
as if we had a secret between us," she explained, "the secret of the
garden. Besides, I shall always love it because it was there I first
suspected that you--cared. When did you begin to care, Peter?"
"Since before I can remember. Would you like to live in it?"
"In this palace? Here in Venice?"
"It's for rent," he told her; "the consul has it."
"But could we afford it?"
"Well," said Peter, "if you like it so much, at the rate things are
here, we can pull it up by the roots and take it back to Bloombury."
They lost themselves in absurd speculations as to the probable effect on
the villagers of that, and so failed to take note as their gondola nosed
into the green shadow under the consulate, of the _Merrythought's_
launch athwart the landing, until the captain himself hailed them.
"This port," he declared, "is under embargo. I have been waiting here
since half tide and there's nothing doing. Somebody's in there chewing
red tape, but I don't calculate to let anybody else have a turn at it
until I get my bit wound up an' tied in a knot. Now don't tell me you've
got business in there?"
"We want to find out something."
"Well, when ye find it, it won't be what ye want," asserted the captain
gloomily. "It never is in these Dago countries." He motioned his own
boat aside from the landing. "If ye want to go inside and set on a
chair," he suggested, "I'll not hender ye. I like the water best myself.
I hope your business will stand waiting."
"To everybody but ourselves," said Peter. "You see," he caught the
permission lightly from Miss Dassonville's eyes, "we want to get
married."
"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 Dassonville, "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 Dassonville 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 substitute for dreams, and
a situation for himself for which he began to discover more appetite
than he would have believed. It was likely, he thought, that he would
himself take a turn at planning the garden.