“She tackles anything I want. Her patience is inexhaustible.”
“I have always been fond of reading aloud,” she said quietly. “It never tires me.”
“Well,” said Austin presently, when George and he were sitting in front of the hotel, pipe in mouth, lazily contemplative of the lagoon, and the church on the other side. “What do you think of my protégée?”
“I think your family were right in calling you a fool. Becky Sharp was not in it with Miss Smith. She has got your uncle in her pocket, and can do just what she likes with him.”
“No, George, Uncle Conway is not that kind of man. But if he were, it is all the same to me. I don’t want his money.”
“Of course not — neither do I — but perhaps Mary Smith does. Anyhow, two or three million sterling is worth some thought.”
“In this vulgar age, when the golden calf stands on every staircase in Belgravia, and all people who go up and down kneel and worship, or if they don’t kneel with their flesh and bones, they are kneeling in their hearts, and saying: “How much? Is this new Sir Gorgias a triple or quadruple millionaire? Will it pay us to dine with him, or to stand in the crowd at his wife’s parties?”
“You can afford to talk like that,” said George, refilling his pipe. “You are not a busy barrister, but a sleepy old barnacle, and your only use for big money would be to let it dribble out of your pocket in the East End.”
“Be easy in your mind, George. Mary is not scheming for the big money.”
“Perhaps she knows the wiser way, and will get it without scheming.”
Austin was too angry to answer, and left him alone in front of the golden water.
George filled his pipe for the third time since tea. He sat staring at the shining plane between the Riva and the great church of his saintly namesake.
“I hate an inscrutable woman,” he muttered to himself, “and I hate a woman with a past.”
He had suffered by a woman with a past, and the old wound ached even yet, quite enough to make him suspicious of every woman whose young life was not an open page, offering itself to every scrutinizer. The bread-and-butter miss, smelling of the schoolroom, was now his ideal. And unfortunately whenever he met the ideal she bored him to extinction. That is why he told himself that he had done with women, and laid out his life in pathways where women never trod. He had never forgotten that mistake of ten years ago. He had been won by matchless beauty, by a charm so thrilling that nothing counted before that first meeting in the dancing-room at the “ Gilded Lily” — the young men’s club of a dead-and-gone day — the club which offered all-night dances and a liberal education in fast life.
He was sorry that he had met this peerless creature in that Bohemian atmosphere, where the scent of hot-house flowers was poisoned by the reek of cigar smoke, where audacious necks glittered with Parisian diamonds and Oriental eyelids drooped under the weight of the paint that blackened them.
Miriam had shone like a star among the painted herd, in the pristine freshness of her beauty — so utterly unlike the rest that he believed her pure. She was there by an accident, he thought. Some scoundrel had lied to her about the place, and had persuaded her to come.
She was waltzing with a boy he had known as an undergraduate at Merton, and he made the boy introduce him to her. Her voice was low and sweet, her manner perfect. There was nothing to disenchant or to repel. It shocked him that she should be in that place; but in herself there was nothing that could shock. They sat talking for half an hour on a wide landing, just outside the crowd going down to supper, and the crowd going back to the dancing-room.
She refused supper. She was going home almost immediately.
“I think this must be the first time you have been here,” he said.
“No, I come here often. I am fond of waltzing, and one meets good dancers — and the people amuse me. I lead a solitary life, you see, and I like a scene that takes one out of oneself.” She spoke simply and naturally, as if there were no occasion for apologies.
“I like your young friend, the Oxonian. He told me funny stories about the’Varsity and the queer old dons, and the bear-fights.”
After this George asked if he might call upon her.
Yes, he might call.
“To-morrow?”
“Yes, come to tea to-morrow. I live in St. Patrick’s Grove, just off the Brompton Road — Number 12. I have a sweet little house, with a wee garden that I love. But they are going to sweep it away next year, to make room for a pile of flats.”
He was at the sweet little house in St. Patrick’s Grove sometimes, often, always. He was in Circe’s Cave. Men warned him, and he hated their officiousness.
She had told him her version of the past, sobbing, with her eyes hidden against his breast. It was a commonplace story of seduction — a pure and cloudless girlhood spoilt by a heartless egoist — a brief year of spurious pleasures — desertion — desolation
“I am quite alone in the world — quite alone,” she moaned. “Only a woman knows what that means.” There was no more loneliness for Mrs. Stanhope after this. George Bertram gave himself up to her body and soul, lived only to make her happy. He took her to Paris, Switzerland, to the Italian lakes, Florence, to Rome. Wherever her fancy led they went. She was easily bored, and he soon found that a solitude à deux would not satisfy her. Yet, with a singular want of understanding, he thought that to marry her would make her a new woman.
George had come to Venice with a bag full of briefs, and he meant to work hard in that reposeful city. Too reposeful — for there was a perilous softness in the air that breathed between the hills and the sea, a too slumberous note in the cry of the gondoliers and the swish of their oars through placid wavelets as they slid under the edge of the quay, past the big hotel. It was difficult to resist the charm, to stick with dogged elbows on his writing-table in the ogee window on the third floor, and not to look out into the soft light across to the great church on the other side of the lagoon. He fought with the devil of lassitude, such an insinuating irresistible fiend, and stuck hard to the uninviting task, the labyrinthine gloom of a Chancery suit, covering page after page of shining foolscap, that seemed too preposterously dull to pore over within the sound of silver bells, and the wish-wash of water.
He read from the seven o’clock coffee and rolls to the bells of noon, when Austin’s sharp rap at his door brought a delicious sense of relief.
“My dear fellow, have you forgotten that your uncle wanted us to go to Torcello with him, and eat our luncheon in the gondola?”
“You and I, my uncle and Miss Smith — no, I had not forgotten. I suppose the inevitable Smith is to be of our party?”
“Mary is inevitable wherever your uncle is going.”
“And one is to take her for granted, like his eyeglasses, and his newspaper. Poor thing!”
“You needn’t pity her. She is quite satisfied with her life — even happy.”
“In anticipation of the superior life she will lead by and by when the dear old man has left her a handsome slice of his two or three millions.”
“Drop that, George. It is bad enough for the women of the family to be full of mean thoughts. Don’t let us imitate them.”
“My mind is only human, Austin, and I can but think as all the world would think in the circumstances. That the young lady’s exquisite placidity in a situation that would be impossible to the average girl is entirely without arrière-pensée transcends my power of belief.”
“Well, get your panama and come downstairs. No matter what you think so long as you are civil. Don’t keep an old man and a young lady waiting. The gondola is at the side door, and my uncle is being carried down the steps.”
“Keep him waiting, poor martyr. Not for the world!” cried George, as he ran downstairs after his cousin.
XIV
THAT little voyage to Torcello in the soft April noontide was a blissful interlude in the dull grey of humdrum lives. George gave himself up to the charm of the hour. He
let the magic of the time hold him. He ceased to think. He only lived.
That picture of the gondola with the strange figure of the broken man, supine upon his adaptable couch, a work of infinite art and ingenuity, his head supported by carefully adjusted cushions, and his eyes looking dreamily across the blue water to the deeper blue of the horizon, and of the pale, delicately-featured girl sitting beside him, watchful of every change in his face and every movement of the beautiful attenuated hands, was something not easily to be forgotten even by the man who looked at it with the cynic’s deep-rooted belief that most women are worthless, and most men are fools.
That his uncle was in the toils of a modern and more subtle Becky Sharp was an opinion that had been too long current in his family to be easily dismissed. Given the circumstances, what else could she be?
It was a long and restful day, monotonous and slow — a day on which nothing was expected to happen. The gondola was moored within the shadow of the cathedral, and George, who knew the island by heart, went alone to look at the wonderful Madonna, while Austin helped Mr. Field’s valet to unpack and arrange the luncheon on the folding table in front of his uncle’s couch. There were other folding tables, and everyone was to eat and drink at ease in the calm, unhurrying day.
The meal was long and gave ample scope for conversation, for Mr. Field ate slowly and consumed so little of the delicate food and the bright sparkling wine as to make both his nephews ashamed of their healthy appetites.
When the last trace of luncheon had been swept away and the fragments distributed among the school-children who came to stare, Field ordered Austin to take Mary round the island.
“You are to show her everything,” he commanded, “everything! And you are to tell her all you know about the history of the place. And you are not to hurry her, as I may want her to talk to me about Torcello in one of my white nights. She has read all the books she could get hold of, and I dare say she knows more than you, but it will do you both good to talk about it. George can stay with me and read yesterday’s Times — everything except the leading articles, which always make me angry.”
“Because they don’t jump with your politics?” George asked.
“Because I remember what a Times leader was like when Delane was at the helm. Something to make a fellow think. Ichabod! Ichabod! And now we have leaders on ‘Suburban Gardens’ or ‘Spinsters and Curates,’ mild facetiousness even, where the Thunderer used to roar. It is hard lines to grow old, my friends — labour and sorrow, memory and regret, that is what those late years mean for most of us.”
The young men listened with sympathy and understanding. They thought it was good for this victim of fate to grumble. He was never known to complain of physical ills, but bore pain and helplessness with the impassibility of a stoic. Only by some sudden contraction of the brow, some nervous movement of the thin lips, did his friends know of the wave of pain, the revolt against fate. If it were a solace to dwell upon the greatness of the past, and to enlarge with open scorn upon the deterioration of the present, it was not for the young and strong to grudge him that poor relief. For them the Present was all in all, for him only the Past was alive — the world he had known before the great axe fell and cut him off from the life that includes joy and hope.
Austin took charge of Mary Smith, and they moved slowly over the coarse rank grass through the sunshine. Mary knew they were walking above the foundations of a city that had been populous and splendid, convents, palaces, churches, the mother city of Venice, of which nothing was left but the cathedral, gaunt and grim in its stone severity, which Time had spared, and the Museum full of relics and vestiges that modern intelligence has garnered.
Austin told Mary all he knew about Torcello, only to find that she knew more. His uncle had talked to her, and his uncle’s conversation was always exhaustive. There was nothing left for any other speaker to finish where he had begun. A man with a marvellous memory, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Since that last fatal ride there was nothing left for him but to know. He took up one subject after another, and he found that world of books inexhaustible, so that he, for whom life without them must have been a burden, found the time too short.
“You are really wonderful,” Austin told Mary after they had turned the story of Torcello inside out. “My uncle was curiously lucky in finding such companionship for his sad years.”
“I hope they are not very sad. I think the slow, monotonous life has grown his second nature, and that if some good fairy were to wave a wand and make him a strong man again, he would hardly know what to do with his days.”
She stopped suddenly.
“I forgot. Yes, I know what he would do. He would send for the best horse that could be got, mount and ride away.”
“Surely the mere idea of a horse must be loathsome to him.”
“No. I have seen him look at horses in the Park, and his face light up at the sight of a beautiful beast.
He has never spoken to me of his accident, without regretting that the horse was killed, the finest he had ever had.”
“Well, Mary, what do you think of my cousin George?”
“I have seen very little of him.”
“Enough to have an opinion.”
“I think he has a clever face.”
“And a bad manner?”
“Certainly not a pleasant manner.”
“Pleasant is out of the question where George is concerned. He prefers being unpleasant. You must know that he is a cynic; he got his heart put out of gear — I won’t say broken — by a worthless woman when he was young and saw this world couleur de rose, and now he sees nothing anywhere but the colour of lead. Man delights him not, nor woman neither, but he enjoys his successes in the Law Courts, and he will go into Parliament by and by when the House of Commons is a place for a gentleman. Then he will go on and on — will be made a judge, and will marry a rich commonplace widow, or a young sprig of nobility with a courtesy title, and a long list of useful relations, linking him with all the important people.” They had several such days before the cousins went back to London — long reposeful days on the islands and on the mainland, exploring every spot of interest to which Conway Field could be carried over the quiet water. They had just a week of perfect weather, broken only by a tremendous thunderstorm which came one night while they were at dinner, a tempest so appalling that they could only sit pale and silent, waiting for the culminating crash and the gradual diminuendo as the storm rolled slowly away to Padua or Verona.
George spent the early morning over his briefs — sprang out of bed at seven in order to give himself plenty of time for bath and breakfast and work, before the gondola was waiting at the bottom of the steps in the narrow side street. Only once in those six days had his uncle occasion to say that he was almost waiting. He wondered at the young man’s alacrity for a stereotyped excursion.
“I thought our mornings would have bored you, since you knew Venice by heart.”
“Ten years ago? Yes, but I am old and serious now, and I see things with other eyes. Ten years ago Venice meant curiosity, excitement, a feverish desire to see things that were fresh and strange. Now she means rest — the dolce far — waking dreams — long thoughts. I shall fall asleep in Court in the midst of some tedious case and dream myself back in this gondola, and hear the plash of oars and the ripple of water.”
Austin watched him as he spoke, and saw that his eyes were on Mary’s face, grave and quiet in the clear light, a face that told nothing.
This was their last day, and the last evening was saddened by a sudden attack of pain which sent Mr. Field to his room, where Mary followed him half an hour later. The valet had come for her. His master was a little easier now, he was lying down, and would she read to him?
She went quickly, with a brief good-night to the young men who were playing piquet by the wood fire.
“We shall be here when you come back,” Austin said.
“I think not. He may like me to read for some hours.”
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“What is the book?” George asked, thinking the next moment, “What an imbecile question! As if it mattered — as if anything mattered about her!”
“‘The Bride of Lammermoor.’ We are going through Scott in the bad nights.”
“Making them worse, I should think,” George said, with a short angry laugh, as the door shut behind her.
“All true lovers of Scott read his best novels once a year,” said Austin quietly, as if it were an interesting fact.
George threw the cards into the fire, and half a dozen sovereigns on to the table.
Austin pushed the gold back to the loser.
“I won’t take your money; you have been playing vilely, and your thoughts must have been miles away.”
“I wish they had been. They were all in this room.
Come for a walk, Austin, and take my dirty coin for your East-enders. I shall suffocate if I am here another minute. Come to the piazza and the narrow streets, and let me walk down the demon that is in me.”
“Hadn’t you better do that alone?”
“No — I want you. There is something you can tell me — and you’ll have to do it.”
Austin laughed, but it was good-natured laughter, as a father laughs at his spoilt child. He pulled back the heavy brocade curtain, and the moonlight poured into the room.
“Yes, it’s wicked to be indoors on such a night.”
The quay of the slaves was alive with people when they went out, noisy happy people, and the twang of the Cockney tourist was mixed with the soft Venetian dialect, with French, and still more with German. The place in this mild May-time was the playground of Europe. To be there — only to be there was to be happy!
They got themselves away from that over-exuberant happiness as fast as their legs could carry them, crossing the piazza where the great clock was striking ten, George leading, piercing the narrow calle, cleaving their way through the crowd till they came to a quiet spot amidst the tangle of streets and bridges and hidden water, a spot where there was a broad flight of steps in front of a tall brick church that very few tourists came to look at, though there were treasures of art inside, as there are everywhere in the wonderful city. Here George threw himself down upon the highest of the steps and bade his cousin sit beside him.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1016
