Chapter 8

The reflection crossed the Colonel's mind that this was the first time, in all these weeks, that he had been alone with the Signora. He wondered, in a self-distrustful way, what would come of it. It was certainly very sweet to him to have her there beside him, quite to himself. He wondered whether it struck her that it was an intimate, confidential sort of situation. He was sitting a little forward, as his habit was, and as he glanced under the awning, at the pretty, rural bit of country that bordered the canal, it was easy to include her face in his survey from time to time.

They chatted for a while of this and that indifferent topic, but it was clear that they were both preoccupied and they soon fell silent. The Colonel indeed, was nervously sensible that fate was closing in about him, and that he might, at any moment, be betrayed into a false step. For, despite his practical, Yankee common-sense, the old soldier was something of a fatalist, and in the one most critical relation of his life, he had always felt himself subject to mysterious and irresistible influences.

Presently, as they came out upon the sparkling waters of the lagoon, the Signora spoke. There was something in her voice that caused the Colonel to turn, at the first word, and as he looked into her face, he pleased himself with noting a new animation, that seemed a direct reflex of the light that played upon the waters. Had he not long ago discovered that mystic kinship?

"Geof and I are very grateful to you," she was saying, "for bringing those charming girls of yours to Venice."

"You like them!" he exclaimed. "I knew you would. Nice girls, both of them. It has been a great thing for them, having you here, and Geof. Geof's a capital fellow."

She turned upon her companion a questioning, yet on the whole a pretty confident look. "Colonel Steele," she asked, "should you greatly mind if one of your Pollys should find it in her heart to make my boy happy?"

"What's that?" the Colonel cried. "You don't mean?--Bless my soul, I never thought of such a thing!"

"It seems the most natural thing in the world to me," she said. "And yet,--supposing your Polly should fail us! I can't expect Geof to be as irresistible to other people as he is to me." She smiled, as if she were half in jest, yet there was real anxiety in her tone as she asked: "What do you think about it, Colonel Steele?"

"Why; I'm sure I don't know. It's something of a shock,--that sort of thing always is, you know. Young people do go into it so easily. Of course Geof's a fine fellow. You mean the little one?"

"Of course," said Mrs. Daymond; for though Pauline was far from little, she had not the height of her tall young sister.

"Of course, of course. Well, well! And you want to know what I think about it? I think she would be a lucky girl. That would make her your daughter, wouldn't it? Why, of course she'll say yes! Any girl would be a fool who didn't, and Polly's no fool. I only wish you had another son for the other one!"

"I'm afraid she won't take Geof for my sake," Mrs. Daymond said, smiling, half sadly.

"Oh, yes, she will; I'm sure she will!" cried the Colonel. "But what I don't understand is--Geof. To be taken with a child like Polly, when,--" He turned sharp about, and looked into her face, and there was no mistaking his meaning. It was almost as if he had spoken the words she had so often heard from his lips.

A great tenderness and compunction swept over the Signora, and found expression in her face. Her beautiful grey eyes met the impassioned trouble of her old friend's gaze, with a gentle directness that in itself went far toward disarming and tranquillising him.

"I sometimes think," she said, "that perhaps this is what all our--trouble has meant, yours and mine."

There was something indescribably consoling in the community of sorrow the words seemed to imply. He had never thought before, that his life-long chagrin had awakened anything more than a momentary regret in her mind, that it had been a sorrow to her as well.

They were rowing past the cypresses of San Michele, and the Colonel lifted his hat and placed it on his knees, looking straight before him, with the slightest possible working of the muscles of his face. The voice he was listening to was sweet and low, the tender cadence of it seemed to inform the words she used with a spirit not inherent in them.

"I think," she was saying, "that I should be perfectly happy if I could know that the long misunderstanding that has caused us both so much pain, had had a meaning as sweet and acceptable to you as it would be to me."

The Colonel pulled out his pocket-handkerchief and wiped his forehead, surreptitiously including his eyes in the process.

"I've been a brute," he muttered, in rather a husky voice, scowling savagely into the crown of his hat, which he had lifted from his knees. As if displeased with its appearance, he put it on his head, where he planted it firmly.

She knew that she had all but won the day, and she ventured what she had not ventured before. For it had never been her way to prate of an impossible friendship; if she used the word she meant to honour it. And to-day something told her that at last she held control of the situation.

There was nothing in her voice to betray the intense exertion of will that she was conscious of making; on the contrary, her words sounded only wistful and entreating, as she said:

"What friends we should be!"

And because it was the first time she had made that appeal to him, and because these weeks of pleasant, normal companionship had subtly and surely changed their relation, the Colonel could meet her half-way, like the gallant fellow he was.

"What friends we _shall_ be!" he cried, clasping the hand which she had involuntarily lifted. "And we won't let it depend upon those youngsters either!"

The gondola had entered one of the canals of the city, and presently they passed under a bridge and came out in front of the square of San Paolo and San Giovanni, where the superb statue of Coleoni on his magnificent charger stands clear-cut against the sky.

"Glorious thing, that," the Colonel remarked, as he invariably did, as often as his eye fell upon it.

"Yes," she replied; "it is the very apotheosis of success. And yet,--one sometimes questions whether a perfectly successful man is as enviable as he seems. What do you think about it, Colonel?"

"Signora," the Colonel answered, with a flash of feeling in his rugged features that would have done credit to Vittorio's expressive face, "I have had my promotion, and I envy no man!"

XIII

Illuminations

If Geoffry Daymond had known no more about Nanni than was known to May herself, the little incident which had caused such perturbation in the young girl's mind would not have made any special impression upon him. The scene itself, indeed, might have lingered in his mind as one of those charming surprises that lurk in the enchanted atmosphere of the lagoons. The striking beauty of Nanni's countenance is the possession of many an honest gondolier, nor would the glow of feeling which animated the face, have been anything unprecedented in a man of his class. Old Pietro himself, slumbering at that moment on the floor of his gondola, often exhibited a startling power of facial expression, which fairly transfigured his weather-worn features. No, in a simple gondolier both beauty of face and brilliancy and depth of expression are quite in the natural order. And if it is not often that one sees these advantages heightened by so admirable a foil as was provided on this occasion, it is simply because such vivid grace of the contrasting type is rare.

Geoffry's first sensation then, as he caught sight of the two figures, was one of gratification to his artistic sense; and even when May extended her hand, and Nanni, after the custom of the gondolier, raised it to his lips, it did not at once strike the young man as other than natural and fitting. In an instant, however, he recalled the fact, which he had learned of Pietro a month previous, that this was no mere gondolier, but a man of education and consequence in the world; a circumstance which, undeniably, put a different face upon the matter. It accounted too, perhaps, for the curiously appealing impression of the man's personality. There was undoubtedly something pathetic in this son of a line of gondoliers, reaching back farther than many a titled family, this man with an innate love for the craft, a genuine passion for the lagoons, placed in the artificial environment of modern society, constrained to deal with the hard-and-fast exactions of modern science. No wonder that there was that about him that excited the imagination. Geof had himself felt it; his mother had spoken of it. Who could know how powerful the appeal might be to one who had not the key to the puzzle?

When, therefore, Geof came upon the little drama being enacted among the alders at Torcello, with a grace and fervour which was for an instant, but only for an instant captivating, he experienced a feeling of vague dissatisfaction, which was much accentuated by the sight of the young girl's evident emotion, as she turned and faced him unexpectedly.

He did a good deal of pondering in the course of that day and the next, and, as he was quite unable to justify, or even to formulate his anxieties, he wished that he might at least find out whether the truth in regard to the gondolier were known to May. That might throw some light upon the subject.

He was aware, to be sure, of the Colonel's studied secrecy in the matter, but secrets are ticklish things at the best, and no stray hint was likely to have been lost upon a girl of May's intelligence. He had a notion that, if he could get a word with Nanni himself, it would be easy to sound him on the point; a delusion that was destined to be early dissipated.

On the second morning following the Torcello trip, Geof was swimming in the Adriatic, far out beyond the line of bathers, shouting and splashing; in the shallows. There, under a dazzling sky, with a strong wind blowing, and whitecaps careering about, he came face to face with the subject of his speculations. The incongruity of catechising a man of his countenance was instantly apparent.

"_Buon giorno, Signore_," said Nanni, and Daymond found himself returning the salutation with a courtesy that was little short of deferential. The two men had met upon a common footing,--if the watery deep may be said to furnish one,--and Geof had found himself at a disadvantage.

The incident did not altogether allay his friendly solicitude; on the contrary, he was abashed and confounded at this evidence of the power of the Italian's personality; and yet, he was more definitely conscious than he had hitherto been, of a certain racial nobility in the man which commanded confidence.

The wind, that had been a sportive, if somewhat riotous breeze in the morning, gained in force as the day went on. There were few gondolas out in the afternoon, and Geof went about on foot. He walked the length of the wind-swept Riva degli Schiavoni, and then he struck across the city, by narrow alleys and picturesque, out-of-the-way squares, and looked in at certain churches for which the guide-books recommend the afternoon light. Toward the end of the day he found his way back to the Piazza.

The great square was in holiday guise, in honour of some guest of the city. From the three famous flag-staffs in front of San Marco the colours of Italy were floating, rolling and unrolling upon the breeze, in gracefully undulating folds. Men were affixing additional gas-jets to the great candelabra, making ready for the evening illumination.

Just as Geof arrived upon the scene, a boy, with a paper of corn in each outstretched hand, came running down the length of the Piazza, followed by a fluttering swarm of pigeons, hundreds of them on the wing, in hot pursuit of the flying provender. The wings made a sound of multitudinous flapping that was singularly agreeable to the ear. Geof watched their laughing tormenter until he stopped for breath near the base of the _campanile_, and, in an instant, the pigeons were alighting on his arms and shoulders, and gathering in an eager, gurgling mass about his feet. The corn fell in a golden shower among them, and great was the jostling and gobbling and short was the duration of that golden shower.

Geof turned in at the open door of San Marco, and found his way to one of his favourite haunts, a certain dimly sumptuous side-chapel, where a hint of incense always hovers, and a whispered echo, as of long-past _aves_ and _salves_, lingers on the air. Curious carvings are there, and bits of gleaming gold and silver, and, between the pillars, enchanting vistas open out into the transept, or down the mosaic-laid floor of the nave, polished smooth by the feet of generations of worshippers.

As he tarried there, the familiar sense of passive content which he had had of late stole upon him, and he was aware that a certain face and voice were again present with him. Why, he wondered, since it was of other things he had been thinking all day long,--why did that face and voice come to him? Was it merely a habit of mind, a trick of thought engendered by this idle, aimless Venetian life? Or was it a natural association of pure and lovely impressions?

And there, in the rich gloom of the great basilica, traced out and accentuated, as it were, by long bars of light that made a golden pathway down from the high western windows, a light entered into his mind, and he knew what his mother had divined long ago.

There was no shock of surprise in the discovery, only a deep, vitalising satisfaction. It seemed as natural, as inevitable, that he should love Pauline Beverly, as that he should love his life. He knew that he had loved her from the hour of their first meeting; it seemed to him that he had loved her all his life. He was glad that the realisation of it had come to him here in the beautiful church where he had first seen her face. Yet, as he stood looking down the marvellous perspectives of the great sanctuary, only dimly seen in the veiled and brooding light, he felt that the time was past for idle musings, that it behooved him to bestir himself, to get out into the daylight and begin to live.

He walked down the nave, and out into the gay Piazza, where he was not surprised to find that the aspect of things had changed. The flags were still rising and falling on the breeze, unfolding their radiant colours to the declining sun; the deep-throated bell of the _campanile_, which has sounded so many a summons to great deeds, was solemnly tolling the hour; a Franciscan brother stepped across the pavement, bent doubtless upon an errand of mercy. The young man read a new suggestion in each of these familiar sights and sounds. He turned and looked back at San Marco, at the outline of its clustering domes, at its carvings and mosaics, gleaming in full sunshine. In his exalted frame of mind, all these things seemed translated into large and significant meanings; patriotism, philanthropy, art,--his own art, architecture. He wondered what fine thing it would be vouchsafed him to do, to win the girl he loved.

Geoffry Daymond was by nature modest; the accident of worldly prosperity, of personal success, had not changed that; but he was equally by nature determined. Though he felt that something very tremendous would be required of him before he could enter into his kingdom, he never for an instant doubted that he should win. And so it happened, that, as he walked away across the Piazza, his step rang firmer and sharper than ever, and he held his head with the air of a man not easily daunted.

The wind did not go down with the sun, and, when evening came, Geof felt pretty sure that he should find Pauline in the Piazza. Accordingly, he went there in search of her; yet when he came upon her, sitting with May and the Colonel at a little round table in front of Florian's, he found very little to say for himself, in response to her friendly greeting. He joined them at their after-dinner coffee, but he said he had had his smoke, and when, presently, May expressed a laudable desire to go and see what the moon was about, he could do no less than offer to escort her.

"Won't you come, Miss Beverly?" he asked, but there was a constraint in his tone, which to Pauline's mind could have but one interpretation.

"Thank you, no," she said. "I will keep Uncle Dan company. We have not finished our coffee yet."

As they walked away, Uncle Dan looked after the two comely figures, with a newly acquired intelligence of observation. Presently he coughed discreetly, and asked, with a great effort at being merely conversational: "Did it ever strike you, Polly, that young Daymond was getting--er--attentive?"

Pauline, too, had followed them with a look of affectionate goodwill, which deepened to a very sweet and wistful smile, as she answered: "Yes, Uncle Dan; I think he likes May. How could he help it?"

"Now that's odd," the Colonel exclaimed. "Do you know, I had never thought of such a thing. It was the Signora that put it into my head."

"And you are glad, are you not, Uncle Dan? You would like to have it happen?"

"Yes, yes; of course,--for his mother's sake."

Pauline was still watching May and her companion. They had walked on, easily distinguishable in the crowd by reason of their height, and now they were standing a little apart, near the base of the _campanile_, in the full light of the illumination. May was talking, her skirts and ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Geof stood beside her listening, his head bent slightly, with a certain chivalry of bearing which was characteristic of him. The wind made no more impression upon his firm, close-reefed figure, than upon the mighty shaft of the great bell-tower.

"I wish it for his own sake, Uncle Dan," Pauline said. "I do not know any one I should be more willing to trust."

"You don't say so! Well, he's his mother's son, and that is half the battle."

"Yes," Pauline admitted; "that is the way I felt too, at first. But now I know him better it is for himself I like him. He is so strong, and steady, and--good evening, Mr. Kenwick!"

"Ah, good evening! I was sure that unless you had blown away in the course of the day, I should find you in these classic precincts. No, thanks; I've had my coffee, or something answering remotely to that description. What has become of your sister, Miss Beverly? She is getting as chary of herself as an Italian pronoun."

"She was here a moment ago," Pauline replied; "she has gone with Mr. Daymond to pay her respects to the moon."

"Really," said Kenwick, with a hint of annoyance in his manner, to conceal which he continued talking volubly. "Now, I should have thought you would have been the one to go moon-gazing. I should not have associated your sister with the pale and melancholy orb."

"You are very penetrating, Mr. Kenwick. But I don't think you would find the moon especially pale or melancholy this evening. It seemed in high good humour as we caught a glimpse of it on our way over here."

"Mr. Kenwick's penetration is too subtle for a plain man's comprehension," Uncle Dan observed. The persistency with which the Colonel be-mistered Kenwick was an unmistakable sign of disapproval.

"Colonel Steele, I am guiltless of subtlety," Kenwick declared in his most humorous manner; "I, too, am a plain man. But, if you will pardon the platitude, we all know that there is one beauty of the sun, and another beauty of the moon, and it would be pure affectation to ignore the fact."

"Apropos of the heavenly bodies,--when is the _Urania_ to sail?" Pauline asked. She feared that Kenwick might go in pursuit of Geof and May, who had disappeared round the corner into the Piazzetta, and knowing that he liked to talk of his millionaire friends and their steam-yacht, she proceeded to draw him out upon the subject.

May and Geof, meanwhile, secure from interruption, thanks to Pauline's little strategy, were strolling in the Piazzetta, now facing the moon-lit, wind-swept lagoon, glittering beyond the pillars in a thousand broken reflections; now studying the figures of the four porphyry conspirators, engaged in their eternal task of mystification at the corner of San Marco. That all attempts should have failed to settle the character and social standing of those red-complexioned, rather dull-witted gentlemen, who clasped one another in such undecipherable opacity, was almost more than May could bear.

"Don't you think the archæologists are rather stupid to have given up the riddle?" she asked, as she and her escort turned away and stepped out again into the Piazza.

"I dare say they are," Geof laughed, "but I'm sure that those flat-nosed fellows are much more entertaining than they would be if they had been labelled. Jove! What a sight that is!"

He had suddenly turned and looked up at the front of San Marco, gleaming in the brilliant illumination, like a shrine studded with precious stones. In the concentrated light of hundreds of gas-jets, each exquisite detail, each shining gold mosaic and lavish carving stood out with marvellous distinctness. The golden-winged angels that mount a mystic stairway above the great central arch, the bronze horses prancing so harmlessly over the main portal, even the quaint bas-relief of St. George, sitting, with such unimpeachable dignity, upon his camp-stool,--each and all were far more clearly enunciated than ever they are in the impartial splendour of daylight. Against the darkly luminous, unfathomable sky, the outline of the domes showed clear-cut and harmonious, and over yonder, above the great Palazzo, whose columns, for that evening at least, were surely carved in ivory and wrought with lace, a remote, half-grown moon looked wonderingly down.

"The moon is rather out of it, to-night," May observed, with the bright crispness that gave everything she said a flavour of originality. She had taken in the beauty of the scene with a completeness that would have astonished her companion; not a detail had been lost upon her. Yet it was clear that the total effect had not produced an overpowering impression. Geof, for his part, had been really stirred by it, but he had no intention of owning it.

"I don't think we need waste any sympathy on the moon," he replied. "It's usually cock of the walk here in Venice."

Having thus satisfactorily disposed of that subject, the young people turned their steps toward the clock-tower, Geof wondering resignedly why May made no motion to rejoin her family.

"I don't think I agree with you about mysteries," she said, presently; "I can't bear them. There's Nanni, now, the brother of our gondolier," she continued; and then, turning, and looking her companion full in the face: "Can you make him out?"

"What is it about him that puzzles you?" Geof asked, returning her glance with equal frankness.

"I don't know that I can explain it. He seems somehow--different. There is something wrong about him. I don't think he is happy."

"And what if he is not?" said Geof tentatively. "There need be no mystery about that. I don't suppose many men are really happy."

"You don't?" May exclaimed, in naïve surprise.

Geof, to whom happiness had come to seem almost incredible, since he had got a glimpse of what it might be, was himself rather taken aback at his own utterance.

"I rather think," he said, laughing uneasily, "that I only meant that not many people are superlatively happy. As for commonplace, every-day happiness, I suppose that depends upon temperament. Perhaps the man is of a melancholy temperament."

"Perhaps that is it," May answered, thoughtfully; and with one accord they turned into the quiet paved space north of San Marco, where they stood, a few moments, looking out into the brilliant Piazza.