Part 16 (1/2)

”The right one, I am sure of that.”

”But which?”

”I know now,” Peter answered, ”but I am certain that in the morning I shall not be able to remember.”

It was true as Peter had said that the next morning he was in as much doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the s.p.a.cious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that lapped the fore-sh.o.r.e of remembrance.

After an hour in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he thought it might have been the Princess for the first word or two, until he turned and saw Miss Da.s.sonville. She was staring at the dim old canvases patched with saints, and her eyes were tender.

”They are not really saints, you know, they are only a sort of hieroglyphics that spell devotion. It isn't as though they had the breath of life breathed into them and could come down from their canvases as some of them do.”

”Oh,” he protested, ”did you think of that for yourself? It was the Princess who said it to me.”

”The Princess of the Dragon?”

”She came to me last night on the lagoon. It was wonderful,--the water s.h.i.+ne and the rosy glow. I was wis.h.i.+ng I had insisted on your coming, and all at once there was the Princess.”

”The one who stayed or the one who ran away?”

”She declined to commit herself. I suppose it's one of the things a man has to find out.” He experienced a great lift of his spirit in the girl's light acceptance of his whimsicality, it was the sort of thing that Eunice Goodward used to be afraid to have any one hear him say lest they should think it odd. It occurred to him as he turned and walked beside Miss Da.s.sonville that if he had come to Italy with Eunice there might have been a great deal that she would not have liked to hear. He could think things of that sort of her now with a queer lightness as of ease after strain, and yet not think it a merit of Miss Da.s.sonville's so to ease him. They walked through the rooms full of the morning coolness, and let the pictures say what they would to them.

”It is strange to me,” said the girl, ”the reality of pictures; as if they had reached a point under the artist's hand where they became suddenly independent of him and went about saying a great deal more than he meant and perhaps more than he could understand. I am sure they must have a world of their own of picture rock and tree and stone, where they go when they are not being looked at on their canvases.”

”Oh, haven't you found them, then?”

”In dreams you mean? Not in Bloombury; they don't get so far from home.

One of these little islands I suspect, that lie so low and look so blue and airy.”

”Will you go with me in the gondola to discover it?”

”To-night?”

”To-morrow.” He was full of a plan to take her and Mrs. Merrithew to the Lido that same evening to have dinner, and to come home after moonrise, to discover Venice. She agreed to that, subject to Mrs. Merrithew's consent, and they went out to find that lady at a bead shop where she spent a great many hours in a state of delightful indecision.

Mrs. Merrithew proving quite in the mood for it, they went to the Lido with an extra gondolier--Miss Da.s.sonville had stipulated for one who could sing--and came home in time to see Venice all a-flower, with the continual slither of the gondolas about it like some slim sort of moth.

They explored Saint George of the Sea Weed after that, took tea in the public gardens and had a day at Torcello. On such occasions when Peter and Mrs. Merrithew talked apart, the good lady who got on excellently with the rich Mr. Weatheral grew more than communicative on the subject of Savilla Da.s.sonville. It was not that she talked of the girl so much nor so freely, but that she left him with the sense of her own exasperation at the whole performance. It was a thin little waif of a story as it came from Mrs. Merrithew, needing to be taken in and comforted before it would yield even to Peter, who as a rich man had come to have a fair discernment in pitiable cases, the faint hope of a rescue. There had been, to begin with, the death of the girl's mother at her birth, followed by long years of neglect growing out of just that likeness to the beloved wife which first excited her father's aversion and afterward became the object of a jealous, insistent tenderness.

After his wife's death, Dave Da.s.sonville had lost his grip on his property as he had on all the means of living. Later he was visited by a stringency which Mrs. Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence, which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its consequences. Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that she had taught the village school.

The winter before, tramping through the heavy snow, she had contracted a bronchitis that had developed so alarmingly as to demand, by the authority of the local doctor, ”a trip somewhere”--”and n.o.body,” said Mrs. Merrithew, ”but me to go with her.”

”Not,” she added, ”that I'm complainin'. Merrithew left me well off, and there's no denyin' travellin's improvin' to the mind, though at my age it's some wearin' to the body. I'm glad,” she further confided to Peter at Torcello, ”she takes so to Venice. It's a lot more comfortable goin'

about in a gondola. At Rome, now, I nearly run my legs off.”

It was later when Savilla had been kept at home by a slight indisposition from a shower that caught them unprepared, she expressed her doubt of a winter in Italy being anything more than a longer stick with which to beat a dog.

”She will have spent all her money on it, and the snow will be just as deep in Bloombury next year. There isn't anything _really_ the matter with her, but she's just too fine for it. It's like seeing a clumsy person handlin' one of them spun gla.s.s things, the way I have to sit still and see Providence dealing with Savilla Da.s.sonville. It may be sort of sacrilegious to say so, but I declare it gives me the fidgets.”

It ought of course to have given Peter, seeing the interest he took in her, a like uneasiness; but there was something in the unmitigated hardness of her situation that afforded him the sort of eas.e.m.e.nt he had, inexplicably, in the plainness of her dress. His memory was not working well enough yet for him to realize that it was relief from the strain of the secondary feminity that had fluttered and allured in Eunice Goodward.