Part 14 (1/2)

He realized as the girl's eyes filled with tears, that this must have been the child at whose birth, he had heard, the mother had died. ”But I suppose we mustn't talk about Bloombury in San Marco,” he blamed his inadvertence, ”though that doesn't seem to want talking about either.

When you said that just now about its being a picture-book, I was thinking how like it was to one of those places I used to go to in my youth--you know where you go in your mind when you don't like the place where you are. So like. I used to call it the House of the s.h.i.+ning Walls.”

”I know,” she nodded, ”mine is a garden.”

”_Is?_” said Peter. ”There's where you have the advantage of me.”

”Oh!” she exclaimed, spreading her hands toward the pictured wall and the springing domes, ”isn't this the evidence that it _is_ always. Let us look.”

The ma.s.s was over and the crowd departing; they moved from page to page to the storied wall and identified in it the springs of a common experience.

”It's like nothing so much,” said Miss Da.s.sonville, ”as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on the ground.”

”Something like that,” admitted Peter.

”And that's why,” said Miss Da.s.sonville, ”it doesn't make me feel at _all_ religious. Just--just--maternal.”

It appeared by this time they had become well enough acquainted for Peter to remark that she didn't seem to feel under any obligation to experience the prescribed and traditional thrill.

”Well, I'm divided in my mind. I don't want to overlook any of the facts, and I want to give the poor imprisoned things a chance, if they have anything to say that the guide books have missed, to get it off their minds. I've always heard that celebrities grow tired of being forever taken at their public valuation. I've got a _Baedeker_ and a _Hare_ and _The Stones of Venice_ but I neglect them quite as much as I read them, don't you?”

They had come down into the nave and she went about stroking the fair marbles delicately as though there sprang a conscious communication from the touch. He felt his mind accommodating to the ease of hers with a movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that the cloud ma.s.s which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved in rain.

”And I haven't even an umbrella,” explained Miss Da.s.sonville with a real dismay.

”But I'll take you home in my gondola,” it appeared to him providentially provided for this contingency; ”it is here at the Piazzetta.”

”Oh, have you a gondola, and is it as much of a help as people say? Mrs.

Merrithew hates walking, but we didn't know if we should like it.”

They whisked around the corner under the arcade of the ducal palace, and almost before they reached the _traghetto_ the shower was stayed and the sun came out on the lucent water. Peter allowed Miss Da.s.sonville to give the direction lest she should think it a liberty of him to have noticed and remembered it, but he added something to it that caused her, as they swung out into the ca.n.a.l, to enter an expostulation.

”But this is not the way to the Casa Frolli!”

”It's one way; besides, it isn't raining any more, and if you are thinking of taking a gondola you ought to make a trial trip or two, and it's worth seeing how the palace looks from the ca.n.a.l.”

The rain began again in a little while, whitening the water; the depth of it blackened to the cloud but the surface frothed like quicksilver under the steady patter. The awning was up and they were safe against a wetting, but Peter saw the girl s.h.i.+ver in the slight chill, and looking at her more attentively he perceived that she might recently have been ill. The likeness to her mother came out then in spite of her plainness, the hands, the eyes, the pleasant way of smiling; it was that no doubt which had set him on the trail of his old dreams. He tried, more for the purpose of avoiding it than for any curiosity, to remember what he had ever heard of David Da.s.sonville that would account for his daughter's teaching school when she evidently wasn't able for it, but he talked of Mrs. Merrithew.

”I must call on her,” he said, ”as soon as she will permit me. But tell me, what business did I do with her husband?”

”It was a mortgage--those poor McGuires, you know, were in such trouble, and you----”

”Yes, I was always nervous about mortgages. I was bitten by one once.

But dear me, I did not expect to have my youthful indiscretions coming out like this. What else did she tell you?”

The girl laughed delightedly. ”Well, we did rather talk you over. She said you were such a good son. Even when you were a young man on a salary your mother had a best black silk and a second best.”

”Women are the queerest!” Peter commented at large. ”It was always such a comfort to Ellen that mother had a good silk to be buried in. Now what is there talismanic about silk?”