Part 33 (1/2)

These ladies occupied rooms on the third floor of a palace on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, 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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 ca.n.a.l which flowed between--a ca.n.a.l 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 a.s.sistance, 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 pa.s.sing 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 m.u.f.fled 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.”