The gondoliers bent rhythmically to their oars, the gondola went
gently plump-plump, plash-plash, over the smooth water, stirring faint
intermittent breezes; far and wide the lagoon lay dim and blue in a
fume of moonlight, silent, secret, even somehow almost sinister in its
untranslatable suggestions; and before them rose the domes and palaces
of Venice, pale and luminous, with purple blacknesses of shadow, unreal,
mysterious, dream-compelling, as a city built of cloud.
“Perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,” Lucilla--need I mention?--quoted
to herself, and if she didn't quote it aloud, that, I suppose, was due
to the presence of Bertram. She and Ruth sat close together, with their
faces towards the prow, where, like a battle-axe clearing their way
of unseen foes, the ferro swayed and gleamed; he, sidewise, removed a
little to their left. And all three were mum as strangers in a railway
carriage. But, like strangers in a railway carriage, they were no doubt
more or less automatically, subconsciously, taking one another in,
observing, classifying. “I wonder whether he's really English,” Lucilla
thought. He spoke and dressed like an Englishman, to be sure, yet so
many Italians nowadays do that; and, with a private gondola, he
presumably lived in Venice; and there was something--in the aquiline cut
of his features?--in his pointed beard?--that seemed foreign. “Anyhow,
he's a gentleman,” she gratefully reflected; and thereat, her
imagination taking wing, “Suppose he had been an ogre or a bounder?--or
a flamboyant native lady-killer?--or a little fat oily _crafaud de
Juif?_ Besides, he has nice eyes.”
About the nationality of his guests, Bertram, of course, could entertain
no question, nor about their place in the world; in their frocks, their
hats, their poise of head, turn of hand, in the general unself-conscious
selfassurance of their bearing, they wore their social history for daws
to peck at; one's eye, as it rested on them, instinctively supplied a
background of Mayfair, with a perspective of country houses. A thing
that teased him, however, was an absurd sense that he had somewhere seen
Lucilla before, seen her, known her, though he perfectly knew he hadn't.
Her youthfully mature beauty, her bigness, plumpness, smoothness, her
blondeur; those deceptively child-like blue eyes of hers, with their
superficial effect of wondering innocence, and their interior sparkle of
observant, experienced humour, under those improbably dark and regular
brows--such delicate and equal crescents as to avow themselves the
creation of her pencil; the glossy abundance of her light-brown
hair; her full, soft, pleasure-loving mouth and chin, their affluent
good-nature tempered by the danger you divined of a caustic wit in the
upward perk of her rather short nose; the whole easygoing, indolent,
sensuous--sociable, comfortable, indulgent--watchful, critical,
ironic--aura of the woman: no, he told himself, she was not a person
he could ever have known and forgotten, she was too distinctly
differentiated an individual. Then how account for that teasing sense of
recognition? He couldn't account for it, and he couldn't shake it off.
Of Ruth (egregious circumstance) he was aware at the time of noticing no
more than, vaguely, that the young girl under Lucilla's chaperonage was
pretty and pleasant-looking!
All three sat as mum as strangers in a railway carriage, but I can't
think it was the mumness of embarrassment. I can hardly imagine a woman
less shy than Lucilla, a man less shy than Bertram; embarrassment is
an ill it were difficult to conceive befalling either of them. No, I
conjecture it was simply the mumness of people who, having said all that
was essential, were sufficiently unembarrassed not to feel that they
must, nevertheless, bother to say something more. And when, for example,
Bertram, having unwittingly relaxed his grip upon Balzatore's collar,
that irrepressible bundle of life escaped to Lucilla's side and
recommenced his blandishments, they spoke readily and easily enough.
“You mustn't let him bore you,” Bertram said, with a kind of tentative
concern.
“On the contrary,” said Lucilla, “he delights me. He's so friendly, and
so handsome.”
“He's not so handsome as he thinks he is,” said Bertram. “He's the
vainest coxcomb of my acquaintance.”
“Oh, all dogs are vain,” said Lucilla; “that is what establishes the
fellow-feeling between them and us.”
To such modicum of truth as this proposition may not have been without,
Bertram's quiet laugh seemed a tribute.
“I thought he was a collie,” Lucilla continued, in a key of doubt. “But
isn't he rather big for a collie? Is he an Italian breed?”
“He's a most unlikely hybrid,” Bertram answered. “He's half a collie,
and half a Siberian wolf-hound.”
“A wolf-hound?” cried Lucilla, a little alarmed perhaps at the way in
which she'd been making free with him; and she fell back, to put him at
arm's length. “Mercy, how savage that sounds!”
“Yes,” acknowledged Bertram; “but he's a living paradox. The wolf-hound
blood has turned to ethereal mildness in his veins. And he's a very
perfect coward. I've seen him run from a goose, and in the house my cat
holds him under a reign of terror.”
Lucilla's alarm was stilled.
“Poor darling, did they abuse you? No, they shouldn't,” she said, in a
voice of deep commiseration, pressing Balzatore's head to her breast.
But the gondola, impelled by its two stalwart oarsmen, was making
excellent speed. They had passed the sombre mass of San Servolo,
the boscage, silver and sable in moonlight and shadow, of the Public
Gardens; and now, with San Giorgio looming at their left, were threading
an anchored fleet of steamers and fishing-smacks, towards the entrance
of the Grand Canal: whence, already, they could hear the squalid
caterwauling of those rival boatloads of beggars, who, on the vain
theory of their being musicians, are suffered nightly, before the
congeries of hotels, to render the hours hideous and hateful.
And then, in no time, they had reached the water-steps of the Britannia,
and a gold-laced Swiss was aiding mesdames to alight.
“Good night--and thank you so very much,” said Lucilla. “We should have
had to camp at the Lido if you hadn't come to our rescue.”
“I am only too glad to have been of the slightest use,” Bertram assured
her.
“Good night,” said Ruth with a little nod and smile--the first sign she
had made him, the first word she had spoken.
He lifted his hat. Balzatore, fore paws on the seat, tail aloft,
head thrust forward, gave a yelp of reluctant valediction (or was it
indignant protest and recall?). The ladies vanished through the great
doorway; the incident was closed.
V
The incident was closed;--and, in a way, for Bertram, as the event
proved, it had yet to begin. His unknown “guests of hazard” had
departed, disappeared; but they had left something behind them that was
as real as it was immaterial, a sense of fluttering garments, of faint
fleeting perfumes, of delicate and mystic femininity. The incident was
closed, and now, as the strong ashen sweeps bore him rapidly homewards
between the unseen palaces of the Grand Canal, it began to re-enact
itself; and a hundred details, a hundred graces, unheeded at the moment,
became vivid to him. Two women, standing in a rain of moonlight, by the
landing-stage at the Lido, brightly silhouetted against the dim lagoon;
the sudden tumultuous exordium of his men; his own five words with
Lucilla, and the high-bred musical English voice in which she had
answered him; then their presence, gracious and distinguished, there
beside him in the bend of the boat,--their cool, summery toilets, the
entire fineness and finish of their persons; and the wide, moonlit
water, and the play of the moonlight on the ripples born of their
progress, and the wide silence, punctured, as in a sort of melodious
pattern, by the recurrent dip and drip of the oars; it all came back,
but with an atmosphere, a fragrance, but with overtones of suggestion,
even of sentiment, that he had missed. It all came back, unfolding
itself as a continuous picture; and what therein, of all, came back with
the most insistent clearness was the appearance of the young girl who
had so mutely effaced herself in her companion's shadow, and whom, at
the time (egregious circumstance), he had just vaguely noticed as pretty
and pleasant-looking. This came back with insistent, with disturbing
clearness, a visible thing of light in his memory; and he saw, with a
kind of bewilderment at his former blindness, that her prettiness was
a prettiness full of distinctive character, and that if she was
“pleasant-looking” it was with a pleasantness as remote as possible from
insipid sweetness. Even in her figure, which was so far typical as to
be slender and girlish, he could perceive something that marked it as
singular, a latent elasticity of fibre, a hint, as it were, of high
energies quiescent; but when he considered her face, he surprised
himself by actually muttering aloud, “Upon my word, it's the oddest face
I think I have ever seen.” Odd--and pretty? Yes, pretty, or more than
pretty, he was quite confident of that; yet pretty notwithstanding an
absolutely defiant irregularity of features. Or stay--irregularity?
No, unconventionality, rather: for the features in question were
so congruous and coherent with one another, so sequent in their
correlation, as to establish a regularity of their own. The discreet but
resolute salience of her jaw and chin, the assertive lines of her brow
and nose, the crisp chiselling of her lips, the size and shape of her
eyes, and over all the crinkling masses of her dark hair--unconventional
as you will, he said, not attributable to any ready-made category,
but everywhere expressing design, unity of design. “High energies
quiescent,” he repeated. “You discern them in her face as in her figure;
a capacity for emotions and enthusiasms; a temperament that would feel
things with intensity. And yet,” he reflected, perpending his image of
her with leisurely deliberation, “what in her face strikes one first, I
think, what's nearest to the surface, is a kind of sceptic humour,--as
if she took the world with a grain of salt, and were having a quiet
laugh at it in the back of her mind. And then her colouring,” he again
surprised himself by muttering aloud. But when could he have observed
her colouring, he wondered, when, where? Not in the colour-obliterating
moonlight, of course. Where, then? Ah, suddenly he remembered. He saw
her standing under the electric lamps on the steps of the Britannia.
“Good night,” she said, giving him a quick little nod, a brief little
smile. And he saw how red her mouth was, and how red her blood, beneath
the translucent whiteness of her skin, and how in the glow of her brown
eyes there shone a red undergleam, and how in her crinkling masses of
dark hair there were dark-red lights....
The incident was closed, in its substance, really, as matter-of-fact
a little incident as one could fancy; but the savour of it lingered,
persisted, kept recurring, and was sweet and poignant, like a savour of
romance.
“I suppose I shall never see them again,” was his unwilling but stoical
conclusion, as the gondola shot through the water-gate of Cà Bertradoni.
“I wonder who they are.”