Part 15 (2/2)
”Oh, if it came as a reward,” she laughed. ”But nowadays we've reversed the process. One makes sure of the Princess first, lest when the dragon is killed she should prove to have gone away with one of the bystanders.”
Something that clicked in Peter's mind led him to look sharply from one to the other of the two women. In Bloombury they had a way, he knew, of not missing any point of their neighbours' affairs, but their faces expressed no trace of an appreciation of anything in the subject being applicable to his. The flick of memory pa.s.sed and left him wondering why it should be.
He caught himself looking covertly at the girl as the gondola swung into open water, to discover in her the springs of an experience such as lay at the source of his own desolation. He perceived instead under her slight appearance a certain warmth and colour like a light behind a breathed-on window-pane. Illness, overwork, whatever dragon's breath had dimmed her surfaces, she gave the impression of being inwardly inexhaustibly alight and alive. Something in her leaped to the day, to the steady pacing of the gondola on the smooth water tessellated by the sun in blue and bronze and amber, to the arched and airy palaces that rose above it.
The awning was up; there was strong sun and pleasant wind: from hidden gardens they smelled the oleanders. Peter felt the faint stir of rehabilitation like the breath of pa.s.sing presences.
The mood augmented in him as he drifted late that evening on the lagoon beyond the Guidecca, after the sun was gone down and the sea and the sky reflected each to each, one roseate glow like a hollow sh.e.l.l of pearl.
Lit peaks of the Alps ranged in the upper heaven, and nearer the great dome of the Saluti signalled whitely; below them, all the islands near and far floated in twilit blueness on the flat lagoon. There was by times, a long sea swell, and no sound but the tread of the oar behind like a woman's silken motion. It drew with it films of recollection in which his mood suspended like gossamer, a mood capable of going on independently of his idea of himself as a man cut off from those experiences, intimations of which pressed upon him everywhere by line and form and colour.
It had come back, the precious intimacy of beauty, with that fullness sitting there in the gondola, he realized with the intake of the breath to express it and the curious throbbing of the palms to grasp. He was able to identify in his bodily response to all that charged the decaying wonder of Venice with opulent personality, the source of his boyish dreams. It was no woman, he told himself, who had gone off with the bystanders while he had been engaged with the dragons of poverty and obligation, but merely the appreciations of beauty. There had never been any woman, there was never going to be. He began to plan how he should explain his discovery and the bearing of it, to Miss Da.s.sonville. It would be a pity if she were making the same mistake about it. He leaned back in the cus.h.i.+oned seat and watched the silver s.h.i.+ne of the prow delicately peering out its way among the shadowy islands; lay so still and absorbed that he did not know which way they went nor what his gondolier inquired of him, and presently realized without surprise that the Princess was speaking to him.
He felt her first, warm and friendlily, and then he heard her laughing.
He knew she was the Princess though she had no form or likeness.
”But which are you?” he whispered to the laughter.
”The right one.”
”The one who stayed or the one who ran away?”
”Oh, if you don't know by this time! I have come to take you to the House.”
”Are you the one who was always there?”
”The Lovely Lady; there was never any other.”
”And shall I go there as I used?” asked Peter, ”and be happy there?”
”You are free to go; do you not feel it?”
”Oh, here--I feel many things. I am just beginning to understand how I came to lose the way to it.”
”Are you so sure?”
”Quite.” Peter's new-found certainty was strong in him. ”I made the mistake of thinking that the House was the House of Love, and it is really the House of Beauty. I thought if I found the one to love, I should live in it forever. But now that I have found the way back to it I see that was a mistake.”
”How did you find it?”
”Well, there is a girl here----”
”Ah!” said the Princess.
”She is young,” Peter explained; ”she looks at things the way I used to, and that somehow brought me around to the starting-point again.”
”I see,” said the Princess; the look she turned on him was full of a strange, secret intelligence which as he returned it without knowing what it was about, afforded Peter the greatest satisfaction. ”Do you know me now,” she said at last, ”which one I am?”
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