in his slow way to Mrs. Marcy. "In velvet, with those pearls, she does
very well as it is."
"They are only Roman beads," said Claudia. "I don't know what you mean,
of course."
"I had been telling Mr. Blake that they say that if you had a green
velvet, with those big sleeves, you know, and your hair braided close to
the head, to make it look too small in comparison with the shoulders, it
would be a Bonifazio," explained the aunt.
"Your pearls are not so effective as they might be, Miss Marcy,"
continued the visitor, scanning her as she took a seat.
"I do not wear them in this way, but so." She unfastened the clasp, and
rewound the long string in three close rows, one above the other, round
her throat, above the high-coming black of her dress.
"That is better," said her critic.
"It feels like a piece of armor, so I unloosen it as soon as I can," she
answered.
Here the artist came in, hat in hand. "I am on my way home," he said.
"Good-morning, Mr. Blake. I have only stopped to ask about our
expedition this afternoon, Mrs. Marcy."
"Oh, I suppose we shall go," answered that lady, "the day is so fine.
How are they at home this morning, Mr. Lenox?"
"Elizabeth is quite well, thanks; Theocritus as usual. Shall I order
gondolas, then?"
"If you will be so good; at four. Mr. Blake will, I hope, go with us."
And then Mr. Lenox bowed, and withdrew.
"Does the--the idyllic personage accompany us?" asked the gentleman in
the easy-chair.
"It is only a child appended to the name," said Claudia, laughing. "For
some reason Mrs. Lenox always pronounces it in full; she could just as
well call him Theo."
"It is her nephew, and she is devoted to him," explained Mrs. Marcy. "He
is nearly ten years old, but does not look more than five. His health is
extremely delicate, and he is at times rather--rather babyish."
"Peevish, isn't it?" said Claudia. She had taken up two long black
needles entangled in a mass of crimson worsted, and, disengaging them,
was beginning to knit another row on an unfinished stripe. Her
beautifully moulded hands, full and white, with one antique gem on each,
contrasted with the tint of the wool. The thin fingers of Mrs. Marcy
were decked with fine diamonds, and diamonds alone; in spite of the
"foreign ways" of which that lady had accused herself, she remained
sufficiently American for that. She could buy diamonds, and Claudia an
antique ring or two; both aunt and niece enjoyed inherited incomes, that
of Claudia being comfortable, that of Mrs. Marcy large.
These ladies occupied rooms on the third floor of a palace on the Grand
Canal, not far below the Piazzetta. The palace was a stately example of
Renaissance architecture, with three rows of majestic polished columns
extending one above the other across its front. Between these columns
the American tenant, who had once been called "the lily," and her niece,
who was so like a Bonifazio, looked out upon the golden Venetian
light--a light whose shadows are colors: mother-of-pearl, emerald,
orange, amber, and all the changing gradations between them--thrown
against and between the reds, browns, and fretted white marbles of the
buildings rising from the water; that ever-moving water which mirrors it
all--here a sparkling, glancing surface, there a mysterious darkness,
both of them contrasting with the serene blue of the sky above, which
is barred towards the riva by the long, lean, sharply defined lateen
spars of the moored barks, and made even more deep in its hue over the
harbor by the broad sails of the fishing-sloops outlined against it, as
they come slowly up the channel, rich, unlighted sheets of tawny yellow
and red, with a great cross vaguely defined upon them.
Next to the Renaissance palace was a smaller one, narrow and high, of
mediaeval Gothic, ancient and weather-stained; it had lancet-windows,
adorned above with trefoil, and a little carved balcony like old
Venetian lace cut in marble. Here Mr. and Mrs. Lenox occupied the floor
above that occupied by the ladies in the larger palace. Communication
was direct, however, owing to a hallway, like a little covered bridge,
that crossed the canal which flowed between--a canal narrow, dark, and
still, that worked away silently all day and all night at its life-long
task of undermining the ponderous walls on each side; gaining perhaps a
half-inch in a century, together with the lighter achievement of eating
out the painted wooden columns which, like lances set upright in the
sand at a tent's door, the old Venetians were accustomed to plant in the
tide round their water-washed entrances. At four o'clock the little
company started, the three from the Gothic palace having come across the
hall bridge to join the others. Two gondolas were in waiting; as the
afternoon was warm, they had light awnings instead of the antique black
tops, with the sombre drapery sweeping out behind.
"I like the black tops better," observed Claudia. "Any one can have an
awning, but the black tops are Venetian."
"They can easily be changed," said Lenox.
"Oh no; not in this heat," objected Mrs. Marcy. "We should stifle. Mr.
Blake, shall you and I, as the selfish elders, take this one, and let
the younger people go together in that?"
"I want to go in the one with the red awning--the _bright_ red," said
Theocritus. This was the one Mrs. Marcy had selected.
"No, no, my boy; the other will do quite as well for you," said Lenox.
"It won't," replied the child, in a decided little voice.
"It is not of the slightest consequence," graciously interposed Mrs.
Marcy, signalling to the other gondola, and, with Blake's assistance,
taking her place within it.
Mr. Lenox glanced at his wife. She was occupied in folding a shawl
closely over the boy's little overcoat. "Come, then," he said, giving
his hand first to Miss Marcy, then to his wife and the child. The
gondolas floated out on the broad stream.
Claudia talked; she talked well, and took the Venetian tone. "The only
thing that jars upon me," she said, after a while, "is that these
Venetians of to-day--those men and women we are passing on the riva now,
for instance--do not appreciate in the least their wonderful
water-city--scarcely know what it is."
"They don't study 'Venice' because they are Venice--isn't that it?" said
Mrs. Lenox. She had soothed the little boy into placidity, and he sat
beside her quietly, with one gloved hand in hers, a small muffled
figure, with a pale face whose delicate skin was lined like that of an
old man. His eyes were narrow, deep-set, and dark under his faintly
outlined fair eyebrows; his thin hair so light in hue and cut so
closely to his head that it could scarcely be distinguished.
"I hope not," said Claudia, answering Mrs. Lenox's remark--"at least, I
hope the old Venetians were not so; I like to think that they felt, down
to their very finger-tips, all the richness and beauty about them."
"You may be sure the feeling was unconscious compared with ours,"
replied Mrs. Lenox. "They did not consult authorities about the
pictures; they were the pictures. They did not study history; they made
it. They did not read romances; they lived them."
"I wish I could have lived then," murmured Miss Marcy, her eyes resting
thoughtfully on the red tower of San Giorgio, rising from the blue. No
veil obscured the beautiful tints of her face; Claudia's complexion
could brave the brightest light, the wind, and the sun. The dark-blue
plume of the round hat she wore curled down over the rippled sunny
braids of her hair. Mr. Lenox was looking at her. But Mr. Lenox was
often looking at her.
"That would not be at all nice for us," said Mrs. Lenox, in her pleasant
voice, answering the young lady's wish. "If you, Miss Marcy, can step
back into the fifteenth century without trouble, we cannot; Stephen and
I are very completely of this poor nineteenth."
"I don't know," said Claudia, slowly; she looked at "Stephen" with
meditative eyes. "He could have been one of the soldiers. You remember
that Venetian portrait in the Uffizi at Florence--General Gattamelata?
Mr. Lenox does not look like it; but in armor he would look quite as
well."
"I don't remember it," said Mrs. Lenox, turning to see why Theocritus
was beating upon her knees with his right fist.
"You must remember--it is so superb!" said Claudia.
"I want to sit on the other side," announced Theocritus.
"When we come back, dear. See, the church is quite near; we shall soon
be there now," answered his aunt.
"You remember it, don't you?" said Claudia to Lenox.
"Perfectly."
"No--_now_," piped Theocritus. "The wind is blowing down my back."
"If he is cold, Stephen--" said Mrs. Lenox.
"I will change places with him," replied her husband. "Do not move, Miss
Marcy."
"No; Aunt Lizzie must go too!" said the boy. He had wrinkled up his
little face until he looked like an aged dwarf in a temper; he stretched
back his lips over his little square white teeth, and glared at his
uncle and Miss Marcy.
"Let me change--do," said Claudia, rising as she spoke. And Mrs. Lenox
accepted the offer.
"When you have finished my portrait, suppose you paint yourself as a
fifteenth-century Venetian general," continued Miss Marcy, taking up
again the thread of conversation which had been broken by Theocritus's
obstinacy. "The portrait of a man painted by himself is always
interesting; you can see then what he thinks he is."
"And is not?" said Lenox.
"Possibly. Still, what he might be. It is his ideal view of himself,
and I believe in ideals. It is only our real, purified--what we shall
all attain, I hope, in another world."
Thus she talked on. And the man to whom she talked thought it a
loveliness of nature that she passed so naturally and unnoticingly over
the demeanor of the spoiled child who accompanied them. Mrs. Lenox
could, for the present take no further part in the conversation, as
Theocritus had demanded that she should relate to him the legend of St.
Mark, St. George, and St. Theodore climbing down from their places over
the church porch, the palace window, and the crocodile column to fight
the demons of the lagoons. This she did, but in so low a tone that the
conversation of the others was not interrupted.
They reached the island and landed; Mrs. Marcy and Blake were already
there, sitting on the sun-warmed steps of the church whose smooth white
facade and red campanile are so conspicuous from Venice. "We were
discussing the shape of the prow of the gondola," said Mrs. Marcy, as
they came up. "To me it looks like the neck of a swan." Mrs. Marcy never
sought for new terms; if the old ones were only poetical--she was a
stickler for that--she used them as they were, contentedly.
Mr. Blake, who always took the key-note of the conversation in which he
found himself, advanced the equally veteran comparison of the neck of a
violin.
"It is the shining blade of St. Theodore, the patron of the gondolas,"
suggested Claudia.
"To me it looks a good deal like the hammer of a sewing-machine,"
observed Mrs. Lenox, lightly. This was so true that they all had to
laugh.
"But this will never do, Mrs. Lenox," said Blake, turning to look at her
as she stood on the broad marble step, holding the little boy's hand;
"you will destroy all our carefully prepared atmosphere with your modern
terms. Here we have all been reading up for this expedition, and we know
just what Ruskin thinks; wait a bit, and you will hear us talk! And not
one will be so rude as to recognize a single adjective."
"You admire him, then--Ruskin?" said the lady.
"Admire? That is not the word; he is the divinest madman! Ah, but he
makes us work! In some always inaccessible spot he discovers an
inscrutably beautiful thing, and then he goes to work and writes about
it fiercely, with all his nouns in capitals, and his adjectives after
the nouns instead of before them--which naturally awes us. But what
produces an even deeper thrill is his rich way of spreading his
possessive cases over two words instead of one, as, 'In the eager heart
of him,' instead of 'In his eager heart.' This cows us completely."
"I want to go in the church. I don't want to stay out here any longer,"
announced Theocritus. And, as his aunt let him have his way, the others
followed her, and they all went in together.
Compared with the warm sunshine without, the silent aisles seemed cool.
After ten minutes or so Mrs. Marcy and Blake came out, and seated
themselves on the step again. "You have known her for some time?" Blake
was saying.
"Mrs. Lenox? No; only since we first met here, six--I mean seven--weeks
ago. But Stephen Lenox I have always known, or rather known about; he is
a distant connection of mine. His history has been rather unusual. His
mother, a widow, managed to educate him, but that was all; they were
really very poor, and Stephen was hard at work before he was twenty. He
had some sort of a clerkship in an iron-mill, and was kept at it, I was
told, twelve and thirteen hours a day. Before he was twenty-two he
married. He worked harder than ever then, although he had, I believe, in
time a better place. His wife had no money, either, and she was not
strong. Their two little children died. Well, after twelve years of
this, most unexpectedly, by the will of an uncle by marriage, he came
into quite a nice little fortune; the uncle said, I was told, that he
admired a man who, in these days, had never had or asked for the least
help from his relatives. And so Stephen could at last do as he pleased,
and very soon afterwards they came abroad. For he had been an artist at
heart all this time, it seems--at least, he has a great liking for
painting, and even, I think, some skill."
"I doubt if he is a creative artist," answered Blake. "He is too well
balanced for that--a strong, quiet fellow. His wife is of about his age,
I presume?"
"Yes; he is thirty-six, and she the same. They have been over here
already nearly two years. She is a very nice little woman" (Mrs. Lenox
was tall and slender; but Mrs. Marcy always patronized Mrs. Lenox),
"although one _does_ get extremely tired of that spoiled boy she drags
about. Do you know," added the lady, deeply, "I feel sure it would be
much better for Elizabeth Lenox if she would remember her present
circumstances more; there is no longer any necessity for an invariable
untrimmed gray gown."
"Doesn't she dress well?" said Blake. "I thought she always looked very
neat."
"That is the very word--neat. But there is no flow, no richness. She has
been rather pretty once; that is, in that style--gray eyes and dark
hair; and she might be so still if she had the proper costumes. Of
course, going about Venice in this way one does not want to dress much;
but she has not even got anything put away."
"If one does not wear it, what difference does that make?" asked the
gentleman.
"All the difference in the world!" replied Mrs. Marcy. "Let me tell you
that the very _step_ of a woman who knows she has two or three nice
dresses in the bottom of her trunk is different from that of a woman who
knows she hasn't."
"But perhaps Mrs. Lenox does not know that she 'hasn't,'" remarked
Blake. This, however, went over Mrs. Marcy's head.
Within, the others were looking at the beautiful Tintorettos in the
choir. After a while the ill-favored but gravely serene young monk who
had admitted them approached and mentioned solemnly "the view from the
campanile;" this not because he cared whether they went up or not, but
simply as part of his duty.
"I should like to go," said Claudia; "I love to look off over the
lagoons."
They turned to leave the choir. "_I_ don't want to go," said Theocritus,
holding back. "I want to stay here and see that picture some more; and
I'm going to!"
This time Miss Marcy did not yield her wish. "Do not come with me," she
said to Mr. and Mrs. Lenox; "it is not in the least necessary. I have
been up before, and know the way. I will not be gone fifteen minutes."
"I really think that he ought not to climb all those stairs," said Mrs.
Lenox to her husband, looking at the child, who had gone back to his
station before the picture.
"Of course not," answered Lenox. Then, after a moment, "I will stay with
him," he added; "you go up with Miss Marcy."
"I want Aunt Lizzie to stay--not Uncle Stephen!" called the boy,
overhearing this, and turning round to scowl at them.
"He will not be good with any one but me," said Mrs. Lenox, in a low
tone. "You two go up; I will wait for you here."
"The question is, Is he ever good, even with her?" said Claudia,
following Lenox up the long flight of steps that winds in square turns
up, up, to the top of the campanile.
"She says he is sometimes very sweet and docile--even affectionate,"
replied Lenox. "She thinks he has quite a remarkable mind, and will
distinguish himself some day if we can only tide his poor, puny little
body safely over its childish weakness, and give him a fair start."
"She is very fond of him."
"Yes; his mother was her dearest friend, his father her only brother."
Claudia considered that she had now given sufficient time to this
subject (not an interesting one), and they talked of other things, but
in short sentences, for they were still ascending. Twice she stopped to
rest for a minute or two; then Lenox came down a step, and stood beside
her. There was no danger; still, if a person should be seized with
giddiness, the thought of the near open well in the centre, going
darkly down, was a dizzy one.
At the top they had the view: wide green flatness towards the east,
northeast, southeast, with myriad gleaming, silvery channels; the Lido
and the soft line of the Adriatic beyond; towns shining whitely in the
north; to the west, Venice, with its long bridge stretching to the
mainland; in port, at their feet, a large Italian man-of-war; on the
south side, the point of the Giudecca.
"'A Saint-Blaise, a la Zuecca,
Vous etiez bien aise;
A Saint-Blaise, a la Zuecca,
Nous etions bien la!'"
quoted Claudia. "I chant it because I have just discovered that the
Zuecca means the Giudecca yonder."
"What is the verse?" said Lenox.
"Don't you know it? It is Musset."
"I have read but little, Miss Marcy."
"You have not had _time_ to read," said Claudia, with a shade of
emphasis; "your time has been given to better things."
"Yes, to iron rails!"
"To energy and to duty," she answered. Then she turned the subject, and
talked of the tints on the water.
Down below, in the still church, the little boy sat beside his aunt, her
arm round him, his head leaning against her. The monk had withdrawn.
"The angels were all there, no doubt," she was saying; "but only a few
painters have ever tried to represent them in the picture. It is not
easy to paint an angel if you have never seen one."
"Pooh! I have seen them," said Theocritus, "hundreds of times. I have
seen their wings. They come floating in when the sunshine comes through
a crack--all dusty, you know. How many of them there do you suppose saw
the angels? Not that big girl with the plate, anyhow, _I_ know!" Thus
they talked on.
When the two from the campanile returned, and they went out to embark, a
slight breeze had risen. The little boy lifted his shoulders uneasily,
and seemed almost to shiver. Mrs. Lenox felt of his head and hands. "I
think I had better take him back in one of those covered gondolas,
Stephen," she said. "He seems to be cold; he might have a chill."
"Surely it is very warm," said Mrs. Marcy.
"Yes, but he is so delicate," replied the other lady.
"I will go with you, Mrs. Lenox," said Claudia.
"Oh no; the gondolas here are the small ones, I see, and Stephen could
not come with us. Do not leave him to go back alone; if one of us sees
to the child, that is enough."
It ended, therefore, according to her arrangement: she went back with
Theocritus in a covered gondola, Mrs. Marcy and Blake returned as they
had come, while Claudia and Lenox had the third boat to themselves.
Rodney Blake being added, this little party continued its Venetian life.
Lenox made some progress with his portrait of Claudia, but it was not
thought, at least by the others, that his wife made any with Theocritus,
that child remaining as delicate as ever, and, if possible, more
troublesome. In Mrs. Marcy's mind there had sprung up, since Mr. Blake's
arrival, an aftermath of interest in Venetian art and architecture which
was richer even than the first crop; she went contentedly to see the
pictures, churches, and palaces a fourth and even fifth time.
Claudia had a great liking for St. Mark's. "But who has not?" said Mrs.
Marcy, reproachfully, when Blake commented upon the younger lady's
fancy.
"Yes; but it is not every liking that is strong enough to take its
possessor there every day through eight long, slow weeks," answered the
gentleman.
"Not so slow," said Claudia. "But how do you know? You have been here
through only one of them."
"That leanest mosaic in the central dome is an old friend of mine; he
has told me many things in his time (I am an inveterate Venetian
lounger, you know), bending down from his curved abode, his glassy eyes
on mine, and a long, thin finger pointed. Be careful; he has noticed
you."
Several days later, strolling into the church, he found her there. "As
usual," he said.
"Yes, as usual," she answered. Miss Marcy liked Blake; his slow remarks
often amused her. And she liked to be amused--perhaps because she was
not one of those young ladies who find everything amusing. She was
sitting at the base of the last of the great pillars of the nave, where
she could see the north transept with the star-lights of the chapel at
the end, the old pulpit of colored marbles with its fretted top and
angel, and the deep, gold-lined dimness of the choir-dome, into which
the first horizontal ray of sunset light was now stealing--a light which
would soon turn into miraculous splendor its whole expanse.
"It always seems to me like a cave set with gold and gems," said Blake,
taking a seat beside her. "And, in reality, that is what it is, you
know--a wonderful robbers' cavern. As somebody has said, it is the
church of pirates--of the greatest sea-robbers the world has ever known;
and they have adorned it with the magnificent mass of treasure they
stole from the whole Eastern hemisphere."
"I wish they had stolen a little for me--one of those Oriental chains,
for instance. But what pleases me best here is the light. It isn't the
bright, vast clearness of St. Peter's that makes one's small sins of no
sort of consequence; it isn't the sombreness of the Duomo at Florence,
where one soon feels such a dreadful repentance that the new virtue
becomes acute depression. It is a darkness, I admit, but of such a warm,
rich hue that one feels sumptuous just by sitting in it. I do believe
that if some of our thin, anxious-faced American women could only be
induced to come and sit here quietly several hours a day they would soon
grow serene and physically opulent, like--"
"Like yourself?"
"Like the women of Veronese. (Of course I shall have to admit that I do
not need this process. Unfortunately, I love it.) But those Veronese
pictures, Mr. Blake--after all, what do they tell us? Blue sky and
balconies, feasts and brocades, pages and dogs, colors and splendor, and
those great fair women, with no expression in their faces--what does it
all mean?"
"Simply beauty."
"Beauty without mind, then."
"A picture does not need mind. But, to be worth anything, beauty it must
have."
"I don't know; a picture is a sort of companion. One of those pictures
would not be that; you might as well have a beautiful idiot."
"Ah, but a _picture_ is silent," replied Blake.
Claudia laughed. "You are incorrigible." Then, going back to her first
subject, "I wish Mrs. Lenox would come here more," she said.
"You think she needs this enriching process you have suggested?"
"In one way--yes. All this beauty here in Venice is so much to her
husband; while she--is forever with that child!"
"But she does not keep him from the beauty."
"No; but she might make it so much more to him if she would."
"Why don't you suggest it to her?"
"There is no use. She does not understand me, I think. We speak a
different language."
"That may be. But I fancy she understands you."