Part 2 (1/2)
”Where does he get it?”
”A family trait. His father had it when he used to row me twenty-five years ago, and I've no doubt his forbears were all like that. It's a matter of race.”
”A matter of race!” cried May. ”Why, Uncle Dan, when that Italian in the train the other day stared us out of countenance and we asked you to do something about it, you told us it was the custom of the country!”
”That's only Uncle Dan's way of s.h.i.+rking his responsibilities,” Pauline explained. ”It's lucky for you, May, that I'm getting on in life. I don't know what you would do if you hadn't any better chaperon than Uncle Dan.”
”And yet, you don't seem so very old,” May remarked, rather doubtfully, tilting her golden head at a critical angle. ”I don't believe anybody would suspect you of being twenty-seven.”
”That's a comfort,” laughed Pauline, with a humorous appreciation that was like Uncle Dan's.
Pauline Beverly had not, like her sister, a reputation for beauty, yet she possessed undeniable charm. Her hair was of a sunny brown, and softly undulating; her eyes were of the same shade as her hair, and capable of a changing light, and, when she smiled, her face, soft and pure, but not brilliant in colouring, had somehow the look of a brook rippling over brown pebbles in a shady place, where the suns.h.i.+ne comes in threads and hints, rather than in an obliterating flood of light. The years, whose sum seemed to May so considerable, had performed their modelling very gently, conferring upon the countenance that winning quality which is the gift of those who habitually think more of others than of themselves.
They were coming in past the red sentinel-tower of San Giorgio, May still sitting on the low steps facing the stern of the gondola. As the young girl looked past her companions, across the silvery s.p.a.ces of the lagoon, her eyes grew dreamy and far-away. So marked was the phenomenon, that Uncle Dan was moved to exclaim: ”A penny for your thoughts, Polly.”
May started, for she was not often caught sentimentalising. Then, with the directness which characterised her, she said: ”I was wondering whether one might not perhaps find a soul here in Venice.”
”A soul? What kind of a soul?”
”Oh, any sort would do, I suppose. You know Signor Firenzo told me my voice was _bellissima_, but that I hadn't any soul.”
”Perhaps Signor Firenzo is a better judge of voices than of souls,”
Pauline suggested, with a confident little smile.
”A young girl like you hasn't any business with a soul,” Uncle Dan declared. ”If you think you see one coming over the lagoon you had better turn round and look at the Lion of St. Mark's. He hasn't the sign of a soul, yet he's the best of good fellows, as anybody can see.”
May promptly turned, and fixed her eyes upon the cla.s.sic beast in question.
”I didn't know that lions had such long, straight tails,” she remarked.
”The wings strike me as being more out of the common,” Uncle Dan chuckled, much rea.s.sured by Polly's ready return to the judicial att.i.tude.
”I should almost think,” said Pauline, musingly, ”that a lion that had wings and a taste for literature might perhaps have a soul after all!”
IV
A Reverie
When Vittorio was told to come for them in the evening, he had cast a significant glance at a certain radiant white cloud, billowing in the West, and said: ”_Speriamo_”; which, in the vocabulary of the gondolier means: ”Let us hope for the best and prepare for the worst.” Upon which the cloud had gradually taken on more formidable proportions, until, just at dusk, it burst in a torrent of rain, which swept the Grand Ca.n.a.l clear of sight-seers, and sent the nightly serenaders, who usually act as magnets to the wandering gondolas, into the hotels for refuge. A band of them were established in the long, wide corridor of the _Venezia_, where their strong, crude voices and their tw.a.n.ging strings reverberated rather noisily.
Wondering how it must seem to have nerves young enough to sustain such rough treatment, the Colonel abandoned his nieces to their self-inflicted ordeal, and mounted the stairs to his own familiar quarters. And there, as he closed the door behind him, he ceased to speculate upon such ephemeral matters.
He had come up, ostensibly to write some letters, but instead of doing so, he lighted a cigar, and seated himself at the window, watching the swoop of the rain along the hurrying waters of the Ca.n.a.l. The tide was coming in and the wind was with it. One gondola at the ferry was struggling across the current, with difficulty held to its course by the efforts of its straining oarsman. The pa.s.sengers had taken refuge under the _felze_, or gondola hood. Impatient of the slow progress of the boat, the Colonel looked down into the hotel-garden directly beneath his windows, which was drowned in a moist blur, that only seemed intensified where it focused about the electric lights. Over there again, across the Ca.n.a.l, stood the great Salute, showing ghostly and unreal in its ma.s.sive whiteness, half obliterated by the driving rain. It would have seemed that the most perfunctory letter-writing might have been an improvement upon such a prospect as that. Yet the Colonel sat on, puffing in a desultory manner at his excellent cigar, and reflecting that another five years had gone by.
A curious thing, he was thinking to himself, how inevitably he found himself in Venice once in five years. It was not in his plan to do so.
He would have been just as ready to return after an interval of two years, or of three; but, for one reason or another, he never seemed able to arrange his affairs to that end until the fifth year had come round.