I
The narrow slant of water that could be seen between the posts of the
felza was rippling with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak
cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty
outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished
man-of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed
squarely in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a
harbor-boat puffing its devious course to the Lido landing. The
sea-breeze had touched the locust groves of San Niccolò da Lido, and
caught up the fragrance of the June blossoms, filling the air with the
soft scent of a feminine city.
When the scrap of the island Sant' Elena came enough into the angle to
detach itself from the green mass of the Giardino Pubblico, the prow
swung softly about, flapping the little waves, and pointed in shore
where a bridge crossed an inlet into the locust trees.
"You can see the Italian Alps," Miss Barton remarked, pulling aside the
felza curtains and pointing lazily to the snow masses on the blue north
horizon. "That purplish other sea is the Trevisan plain, and back of it
is Castelfranco--Giorgione's Castelfranco--and higher up where the blue
begins to break into the first steps of the Alps is perched
Asolo--Browning's Asolo. Oh! It is so sweet! a little hill town! And
beyond are Bassano and Belluno, and somewhere in the mist before you
get to those snow-heads is Pieve da Cadore." Her voice dropped
caressingly over the last vowels. The mere, procession of names was a
lyric sent across sea to the main.
"They came over them, then, the curious ones," the younger man of the
two who lounged on cushions underneath the felza remarked, as if to
prolong the theme. "To the gates of Paradise," he continued, while his
companion motioned to the gondolier. "And they broke them open, but
they could never take the swag after all."
He laughed at her puzzled look. He seemed to mock her, and his face
became young in spite of the bald-looking temples and forehead, and the
copperish skin that indicated years of artificial heat.
"They got some things," the older man put in, "and they have been
living off 'em ever since."
"But they never got _it_," persisted his companion, argumentatively.
"Perhaps they were afraid."
The gondola was gliding under the stone bridge, skilfully following the
line of the key-stones in the arch. It passed out into a black pool at
the feet of the Church of San Niccolò. The marble bishop propped up
over the pediment of the door lay silently above the pool. The grove of
blossoming locusts dropped white-laden branches over a decaying barca
chained to the shore.
"What is _'it'_?" the girl asked, slowly turning her face from the
northern mountains. She seemed to carry a suggestion of abundance, of
opulence; of beauty made of emphasis. "You," the young man laughed
back, enigmatically.
"They came again and again, and they longed for you, and would have
carried you away by force. But their greedy arms snatched only a few
jewels, a dress or two, and _you_ they left."
The girl caught at a cluster of locust blossoms that floated near.
"It is an allegory."
"I'll leave Niel to untie his riddles." Their companion lit his pipe
and strode ashore. "I am off for an hour with the Adriatic. Don't
bother about me if you get tired of waiting."
He disappeared in the direction of the Lido bathing stablimento. The
two gathered up cushions and rugs, and wandered into the grove. The
shade was dark and cool. Beyond were the empty acres of a great fort
grown up in a tangle of long grass like an abandoned pasture. Across
the pool they could see the mitred bishop sleeping aloft in the sun,
and near him the lesser folk in their graves beside the convent wall.
"No, I am not all that," Miss Barton said, thoughtfully, her face
bending, as if some rich, half-open rose were pondering.
"_He_ says that I am a fragment, a bit of detritus that has been washed
around the world--"
"And finally lodged and crystallized in Italy."
This mystified her again, as if she were compelled to use a medium of
expression that was unfamiliar.
"Papa was consul-general, you know, first at Madrid, then in the East,
and lastly merely a consul at Milan." She fell back in relief upon a
statement of fact.
"Yes, I know."
"And mamma--she was from the South but he married her in Paris. They
called me the polyglot bébé at the convent." She confided this as
lazily interesting, like the clouds, or the locusts, or the faint
chatter of the Adriatic waves around the breakwater of the Lido.
"Nevertheless you are Venice, you are Italy, you are Pagan"--the young
man iterated almost solemnly, as if a Puritan ancestry demanded this
reproach. Then he rolled his body half over and straightened himself to
look at her rigidly. "How did you come about? How could Council Bluffs
make it?" His voice showed amusement at its own intensity. She shook
her head.
"I don't know," she said, softly.
"It doesn't seem real. They tell me so, just as they say that the
marble over there comes from that blue mountain. But why bother about
it? I am here----"
They drifted on in personal chat until the sunlight came in parallel
lines between the leaves.
"Where is Caspar?" he said at last, reluctantly. "It's too late to get
back to the Britannia for dinner." He jumped up as if conscious of a
fault.
"Oh, we'll dine here. Caspar has found some one at the stablimento and
has gone off. Ask Bastian--there must be some place where we can get
enough to eat."
Lawrence hesitated as if not quite sure of the outcome of such
unpremeditation. But Miss Barton questioned the gondolier. "The Buon
Pesche--that will be lovely; Bastian will paddle over and order the
supper. We can walk around."
So Lawrence, as if yielding against his judgment, knelt down and picked
up her wrap. "Bastian will take care of the rest," she said, gleefully,
walking on ahead through the long grass of the abandoned fort. "Be a
bit of detritus, too, and enjoy the few half-hours," she added,
coaxingly, over her shoulder.
When they were seated at the table under the laurel-trees before the
Buon Pesche, Lawrence threw himself into the situation, with all the
robustness of a moral resolve to do the delightful and sinful thing.
Just why it should be sinful to dine there out-doors in an evening
light of luminous gold, with the scent of locusts eddying about, and
the mirage-like show of Venice sleeping softly over beyond--was not
quite clear. Perhaps because his companion seemed so careless and
unfamiliar with the monitions of strenuous living; perhaps because her
face was brilliant and naïve--some spontaneous thing of nature,
unmarked by any lines of consciousness.
Under a neighboring tree a couple were already eating, or quarrelling
in staccato phrases. Lawrence thought that the man was an artist.
Miss Barton smiled at his seriousness, crossing her hands placidly on
the table and leaning forward. To her companion she gleamed, as if a
wood-thing, a hamadryad, had slipped out from the laurel-tree and come
to dine with him in the dusk.
The woman of the inn brought a flask of thin yellow wine and placed it
between them. Lawrence mutely decanted it into the glasses.
"Well?" she said, questioningly.
Her companion turned his head away to the solemn, imperial mountains,
that were preparing with purple and gold for a night's oblivion.
"You are thinking of Nassau Street, New York, of the rooms divided by
glass partitions, and typewriters and the bundles of documents--bah!
Chained!" She sipped scornfully a drop or two from the glass.
The man flushed.
"No, not that exactly. I am thinking of the police courts, of the
squalor, of taking a deposition in a cell with the filthy breathing all
about. The daily jostle." He threw his head back.
"Don't try it again," she whispered.
"I am only over for six weeks, you know, health--"
"Yes? and there is a girl in Lowell,"--she read his mind impudently.
"Was," he emended, with an uneasy blush.
"Poor, starved one! Here is our fish and spaghetti. To-night is a night
of feast."
The dusk grew grayer, more powderish; the mountains faded away, and the
long Lido banks disappeared into lines pointed by the lights of
Torcello and Murano. Sant' Elena became sea, and the evening wind from
the Adriatic started in toward the city. A few sailors who had come for
a glass were sitting under the arbor of the Buon Pesche smoking, with
an occasional stinging word dropped nonchalantly into the dusk. Their
hostess was working in the garden patch behind the house. At last the
artist moved off with his companion through the grove of laurel between
the great well-heads. Bastian loitered suggestively near.
So they gathered their thoughts and followed the gondolier to the bank.
Miss Barton lingered by one of the well-heads to peer at the pitchy
bottom.
"Here they came for fresh water, the last gift of Venice before they
took sail. And sometimes a man never went farther--it was a safe kind
of a grave." She laughed unconcernedly.
"Perhaps you came out of the locusts and took a hand in pitching the
bodies in."
The woman shivered.
"No! no! I only brought them here."
Bastian turned the prow into the current, heading to weather Sant'
Elena. Lawrence took an oar silently. He liked the rush on the forward
stroke, the lingering recovery. The evening puffs were cool. They slid
on past a ghostly full-rigged ship from the north, abandoned at the
point of Sant' Elena, until the black mass of trees in the Giardino
Pubblico loomed up. A little off the other quarter the lights from the
island of San Lazzaro gleamed and faded. It was so very silent on the
waste of waters!
"Come."
Lawrence looked back at his companion; she was holding her hat idly,
huddled limply on the cushions.
"Come," she said again, adding mockingly----
"If you are so ferocious, we shall get there too soon."
Lawrence gave up his oar and lay down at her feet. Bastian's sweep
dipped daintily in and out; the good current was doing his work. They
drifted silently on near Venice. The halo of light above the squares
grew brighter. San Giorgio Maggiore appeared suddenly off the quarter.
Miss Barton signed to the gondolier to wait. They were outside the city
wash; the notes of the band in San Marco came at intervals; the water
slipped noiselessly around the channels, and fire-fly lights from the
gondolas twinkled on the Grand Canal. San Giorgio was asleep.
Miss Barton's head was leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the
black outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the
currents. A big market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding
over the oily water. Several silent figures were standing in the stern.
Lawrence looked up; her eyes seemed lit with little candles placed
behind. Her face gleamed, and one arm slipped from her wrap to the
cushion by his side.
"Bella Venezia," he murmured.
She smiled, enveloping him, mastering him, taking him as a child with
her ample powers.
"You will never go back to 'that'!"
Her arm by his side filled out the thought.
"Never," he heard himself say as on a stage, and the dusky lights from
that radiant face seemed very near.
"Because----"
"Because I am----"
"Sh," she laid her fingers lightly on his forehead. "There is no thine
and mine."
Bastian dipped his sweep once more. San Giorgio's austere façade went
out into the black night. One cold ripple of Adriatic wind stirred the
felza curtains.