reinforced by the consul, the mistress of Casa Frolli, and the minister,
who had turned out to be exactly of Mrs. Merrithew's persuasion, went
aboard the _Merrythought_, blooming out amazingly in bunting and roses
for the occasion. The morning blueness had drained out from the city and
stained the waters eastward as they put out between the red and yellow
sails of the fishing fleet. They saw the cypress-towered islands of
romance melt in the morning haze. The steam launch which was to take
them ashore again ploughed alongside, and there was a pleasant sort of
home smell from the cook's quarters.
Peter sat forward with the bride's hand tucked under his arm and
presently he heard her laughing softly, delightedly.
"Peter, do you know what that is, that good smell I mean?"
"What do you think it is?"
"It's pie baking. Truly, don't you think I'm enough of a housewife to
know that?"
"I know you're everything you ought to be."
"It is pie, there's no doubt about it, but we must pretend to be awfully
surprised when the captain brings it out. But Peter, don't you like it?"
"Pie, my dear?"
"No, but like having everything so homey and--and--so genuine at our
wedding?"
"I hope," said Peter, "it's genuine pie, but I see what you mean, my
dear."
"It's an omen, almost, that we'll always have the good, comfortable,
common things to fall back upon, if our marriage should not prove quite
all we've dreamed it. It's been so perfect up to now; it must drop down
out of the clouds some time."
It seemed rather to have taken a sweep upward when, with sails swelling
over them and the beat of the sea under the bows, they stood up to be
married, and to exhibit capacities of sustaining itself at a level from
which not the very soggy and sallow complexioned pie with the cook
grinning behind it, could dislodge the two most concerned in it. It wore
through the day to a contained and quiet gayety at a dinner which took
place in the _ristoranta_ over the water where they had once lunched
with the captain, and lasted until Peter had brought his wife home again
to the refurnished palace. It had gone, as he told himself, remarkably
well, with every intimation, as he had time to tell himself in his last
hours in the garden with his cigar, of going much better, of becoming as
the place gave him occasion to indulge the figure, an enclosed and
fragrant garden, in which if no flaming angel of desire kept the gate
for him, he had at least the promise of refreshment.
That old passion for Eunice Goodward, all his feelings for all the women
he had known, served to show him what Savilla had meant when she said he
"gave her so much room"--the renewed sense of the spaciousness of life.
It would be there for his wife at the completest, and if she had, as it
seemed, turned him out of the Wonderful House in order to live in it
herself, he at least kept the gates. And was not this the proper
business for a man? He recalled what the Princess had said to him so
long ago when he had first begun to think of himself as a bachelor. "It
takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass." Well, he had
dreamed and he had slain some dragons. Later there would be children
playing in the House, daughters perhaps ... Lovely Ladies. The world
would be a better place for them to walk about in because of all that he
had lost and been.
When he went into the garden he had half expected that the Princess
would speak to him; the place was full of hints of her, faint and
persuasive as the scent of the flowers in the dark, little riffles of
his pulse, flushed surfaces, the tingling of his palms which announced
her, but she did not speak. He said to himself that he was now a well
man and had seen the last of her. Never before had he felt so very
well.
He saw the light moving in the palace behind him as his wife moved to
complete some of her arrangements; he heard her then pacing along the
marble floor of the great hall which went quite through the middle of
it--she must be going to her room, and in a little while he would go in
to her--he heard the light tapping of her feet and then he saw her come,
the lit lamp in her hand.
She had on still the white dress in which she had been married, and over
it she had thrown the silver-woven scarf which had been one of his first
gifts to her, and as she came the light glittered on it; it drew from
the polished walls bright reflections in which, amid the gilded frames,
he saw the dim old pictures start and waver--and as he saw her coming
so, Peter threw away his cigar and gripped suddenly at the balustrade to
steady him where he stood, against what out of some far spring of his
youth rushed upon him, as he saw her come--as he had always seen her, as
he knew now he was to see her always--his wife and the Lovely Lady.
THE END
[Illustration]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N.Y.