Chapter V: Part FOUR (2)

"If you feel that," Peter snatched at encouragement, "that it is really the big thing for her--what I'm sure you can't help knowing what I mean--what I hope."

"What _I_ feel----? After all, it's _her_ feeling, my dear Mr. Weatheral, that we have to take into account. It wouldn't be fair for me to attempt to answer to you for that!"

"And of course if I can't _make_ her feel...." He did not trust himself to a conclusion.

They found, however, when the road issued on the coast opposite the great bursting bulks of spray, that Eunice's desertion and the extenuation of it to which they had lent themselves, had put them out of the mood for the high wind and warring surf of the Reef. Accordingly they turned aside at Peter's suggestion to have tea at a little country inn farther back in the hills, where the pound of the sea was reduced to a soft, organ-booming bass to which the shrill note of the needles countered in perfect tune. The tea garden, the favourite port of call for afternoon drives from the resorts hereabouts, lay back of the hostelry in a narrow, ferny glen from which springs issued. As Peter led the way up its rocky stair, they could hear the light laughter of a party just rising from one of the round rustic tables. The group descending poured past them a summer-coloured runnel down the little glen, and left them face to face with Eunice, who had lingered, her dress caught on a point of the rustic chair.

"Mamma--you!" She looked trapped, accused, though sheer astonishment held the others dumb. "We finished the game----" she began and stopped short; after all, her manner seemed to say, why shouldn't she have tea there with her friends? She made as if to sweep past after them but Mrs. Goodward never moved from the narrow path. She was more embarrassed, Peter saw, than her daughter, and as plainly at bay.

"Now that we are here----" she began in her turn.

"Now that you have followed me here," the girl rang out, "what is it that you have to say to me?" She was white and a bright flame spot showed on either cheek.

"I--oh," the elder woman by an effort drew the remnant of the grand manner about her; "it is Mr. Weatheral, I think, who might have something to say." She caught the occasion as it were on the wing. Peter heard the quick breath behind him with which she grasped it. "Now that you are here, however, I'll tell your party that you will be driving home with us." She gathered up her draperies and was gone down the path she had come before either of the others thought to stop her. Eunice had not made a move to do so. She stood clasping the back of the chair from which she had freed her dress, and looked across it mutinously at Peter.

"And what," she quivered, "has Mr. Weatheral to say to me?"

"There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a little.

"I broke my engagement to you," she admitted, "broke it to come here with--the others. I haven't any excuse to offer you."

"And when," Peter demanded of her, "have I asked any other excuse of you for anything that you chose to do except that you chose it. There _was_ something I wished to say to you, that I hoped for a more auspicious occasion...." He hurried on with it suddenly as a thing to be got over with at all hazards. "It was to say that I hoped you might not find it utterly beyond you to think of marrying me." He saw her sway a little, holding still to her chair, and moved toward her a step, dizzy himself with the sudden onset of emotion. "But now that it is said, if it distresses you we will say no more about it." She waved him back for a moment without altering her strained, trapped attitude.

"Have you said this to mamma? And has she--has she said anything to you? About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"

"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet in so far as _that_ was concerned." He waited for her answer to that, and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped----" She stopped him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.

"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me, that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"

"Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."

"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as something concrete, graspable.

"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could take everything for granted, everything."

"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"

"Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him. "If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly that she shouldn't see how he trembled.

"I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her go.

"Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of tea."

IV

"Peter, have you any idea what I am thinking about?"

"Not in the least, Ellen," which was not strictly the truth. He supposed she must be thinking naturally of the news he had told her not an hour since, of his engagement to Eunice Goodward. It lay so close to the surface of his own mind at all times that the slightest stir of conversation, like the wind above a secret rose, seemed always about to disclose it. They were sitting on the porch at Bloombury and the pointed swallows pitched and darted about the eaves.

"It was the smell of the dust that reminded me," said Ellen, "and the wild rose at the turn of the road; you can smell it as plain as plain when the air lifts a little. Do you remember a picnic that we were invited to and couldn't go? It was on account of being poor ... and I was just finding it out. I found out a good many things that summer; about my always going to be lame and what it would mean to us. It was dreadful to me that I couldn't be lame just by myself, but I had to mix up you and mother in it."

"We were glad, Ellen, to be mixed up in it if it made things easier for you."

"I know ... times I felt that way about it too, but that was when I was older ... as if it sort of held us all together; like somebody who had belonged to us all and had died. Only it was me that died, the me that would have been if I hadn't been lame.... Well, I hadn't thought it out so far that first summer; I just hated it because it kept us from doing things like other people. You were fond of Ada Brown, I remember, and it was because I was lame and we were so poor and all, that you couldn't go with her and she got engaged to Jim Harvey. I hope you don't think I have a bad heart, Peter, but I was always glad that Ada didn't turn out very well. Every time I saw her getting homelier and kind of bedraggled like, I said to myself, well, I've saved Peter from that at any rate. I couldn't have borne it if she had turned out the kind of a person you ought to have married."

"You shouldn't have worried, Ellen; very few men marry the first woman they are interested in."

"There was a girl you used to write home about--at that boarding-house. I used to get you to write. I daresay you thought I was just curious. But I was trying to find out something that would make me perfectly sure she wasn't good enough for you. She was a typewriter, wasn't she?"

"Something of that sort."

"Well!" Ellen took him up triumphantly, "you wouldn't have wanted to be married to a typewriter _now!"_

"I never really thought of marrying one, Ellen. I'm sure everything has turned out for the best."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You see I was determined it should turn out that way. I said, what was the use of being lame and being a burden to you unless there was something _meant_ by it. I'd have fretted dreadfully if I hadn't felt that there was something to come out of it. And it has come.... Peter, you'd rather I'd saved you for this than anything that might have happened?"

"Much rather, Ellen."

It had surprised him in the telling, to see how accurately his sister had gauged the worldly advantage of his marriage. If Eunice Goodward had been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected. Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and fortune as a picture into its frame.

"I'm very glad you feel that way about it, Ellen," he said again; he was on the point of telling her about the House of Shining Walls. The material from which he had drawn its earliest furnishings lay all about them, the receding blue of the summer sky, the aged, arching apple boughs. The scent of the wilding rose came faintly in from the country road--suddenly his sister surprised him with a flash of rare insight.

"I guess there can't anything keep us from the best except ourselves," she said. "Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more trouble than the Lord ever meant for us. Think of the way I've always wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only kind of man who would have married me. As it is, I've had Clarice's and now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour.

Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent engagement she would have thought it indelicate.

"_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set, banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding maternal presence.

"Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep satisfaction his mother's appraisement of young Mrs. Dassonville, who must, as he recalled her, have been shaped by much the same frame of life as Eunice Goodward--the Lovely Lady. The long unused phrase had risen unconsciously to his lips on the day that he had brought Eunice her ring. He had spent a whole week in the city choosing it; three little flawless, oblong emeralds set with diamonds, almost encircling her finger with the mystic number seven. He had discovered on the day that she had accepted him, that it had to be emeralds to match the green lights that her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the mossy bank and the green boughs overhead. On the terrace at Lessings' under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness for Eunice Goodward.

She had been very sweet about the ring, touched with grateful surprise for its beauty and its taste. Something he could see of relief, of assurance, flashed and fell between the two women as she showed it to her mother. They had taken him so beautifully on trust, they couldn't have known, he reflected, whether he would rise at all to the delicate, balanced observation of life among them; it was evidence, the emerald circlet, of how satisfyingly he had risen. The look that passed between mother and daughter was like a spark that lighted as it fell, an unsuspected need of him as man merely, the male element, security, dependability, care. His first response to it was that of a swimmer who has struck earth under him; he knew in that flash where he was, by what familiar shores; and the whole effect, in spite of him was of the sudden shrinkage of that lustrous sea in which his soul and sense had floated. It steadied him, but it also for the moment narrowed a little the horizon of adventure. It was the occasion that Eunice took to define for him his status as an engaged man.

He kept as far as he was able his compact of expecting nothing of her, except of course that he couldn't avoid expecting that their arrangement would lead in the natural course to marriage. She had met him more than halfway in that, agreeing to an earlier date than he had thought compatible with the ritual of engagements in the Best Society. She had managed, however, that Peter should present her with her summer freedom: the engagement was not even to be announced until their return to town. And in the meantime Peter was to find a house. He had offered her travel for that first year. Europe, which he had scarcely glimpsed, glittered and allured. But travel, Eunice let him know, went much better when you had a place to come back to. He saw at once how right was everything she did. Well, then, a house on Fillmore Avenue?

"Oh--shall we be so rich as that, Peter?" He divined some embarrassment in her as to the scale in which they were to live. "We'll want something in the country, too," she reminded him.

"I've a couple of options at Maplemont----"

"Oh, Maplemont----" She liked that also, he perceived.

"And a place in Florida. Lessing and I bought it the winter the children had the diphtheria. They've a very pretty bungalow; we could put up something like it for ourselves--if you wouldn't mind my sister occasionally. Ellen isn't happy at hotels."

"Mind! with all you're giving me! You won't think it's just the money, Peter;" she had a very charming hesitancy about it. "It's what money stands for, beauty, and suitability--and--everything." He was very tender with her.

"It's not that I have such a pile of it either," he assured her, "though I turn over a great deal in the course of a year. It's easier making money than people think."

"Easier for everybody?" There was a certain eagerness in the look and voice.

"Easier for those who know how. I'm only forty, and I've learned; there's not much I couldn't get if I set about it. It's a kind of a gift, perhaps, like painting or music, but there's a great deal to be learned, too."

"And some haven't the gift to learn, perhaps." For some reason she sighed.... He was turning all this over in his mind when suddenly Ellen recalled him.

"Have you told Clarice yet?"

"I mean to, Sunday, if you don't mind my not coming down to you. Miss Goodward is spending the week end at Maplemont, and by staying at Julian's----"

"Of _course_." Ellen sympathized. "I shall want to know what Clarice says." She never did know exactly, for when Clarice gave Peter her congratulations in the terrace garden after dinner, she missed, extraordinarily for her, the felicitous note.

"I'm so happy for Eunice, you can't imagine," she insisted. "I've always said we've none of us known what Eunice can do until she's had her opportunity. And now with all the background you can give her---- You'll see!"

He didn't quite know what he was to see except that if Eunice were to be in the picture it was bound to be satisfying. But Mrs. Lessing was not done with him. "For all her being so beautiful and so well placed," she went on, "Eunice has never had any life at all, not what you might call a life. And she might so easily have missed this. It is hard for girls to realize sometimes that the success of marriage depends on real qualities in the man, in mastery over things and not just over her susceptibilities. It is quite the most sensible thing I've known Eunice to do."

"Only," Peter reminded her for his part, "I'm not just exactly doing it because it is sensible." Her "of course not" was convinced enough to have stilled the vague ruffling of his mind, without doing it. He didn't object to having his qualifications as Eunice Goodward's husband taken solidly, but why dwell upon them when it was just the particular distinction of his engagement that it had the intensity, the spiritual extension which was supposed to put it out of reach of material considerations. Even Ellen had done better by him than this.

He was forced, however, to come back to the substance of Mrs. Lessing's comment a few days later when he was being dined at the club by a twice-removed cousin of the Goodward's, the upright, elderly symbol of the male sanction which was the most that his fiancée's fatherless condition could furnish forth. The man was cordial enough; he was even prepared to find Peter likable; but even more on that account to measure his relation to Miss Goodward in terms of its being a "good thing."

"It's not, you know," his host couldn't forebear to remind him, "exactly the sort of a marriage we expected of Eunice; but if the girl is satisfied----"

"If I hadn't satisfied myself on that point----" Peter reminded him in his turn.

"Quite so, quite so ... girls have notions sometimes; one never quite knows ... You'll keep on with your--just _what_ is it you do such tremendous things with; one hears of course that you _do_ do them----"

"Real estate, brokerage," Peter enlightened him. "I shall certainly keep on with it. Isn't one supposed to have all the more need of it when there's an establishment to keep up?"

The symbol waved a deprecating hand. "You'll find it rather an occupation to keep up with Eunice, I'm thinking. I've a notion she'll go it, once she has the chance."

"If by going it, you mean going out a great deal, seeing the world and having it in to see her, well, why shouldn't she, so long as I have the price?" He could only take it good-naturedly. It was amusing when you came to think of it, that a man who would contribute to the sum of his wife's future perhaps, the price of a silver tea salver, should so hold him to account for it. Nevertheless the talk left a faint savour of dryness. It was part of his new pride in himself as a possession of hers that he should in all things come up to the measure of men, but the one thing which should justify his being so ticketed and set aside by them as the Provider, the Footer-up of Accounts, was the assurance which only she could give, of his being the one thing, good or bad, which could be made to answer for her happiness.

Walking home by the river to avoid as far as possible the baked, oven-smelling streets, he was aware how strangely the whole earth ached for her. He was here walking, as he had been since his first seeing her, at the core of a great light and harmony, and walking alone in it. If just loving her had been sufficient occupation for his brief courtship, for the present it failed him. For he was not only alone but lonely. He saw her swept aside by the calculating crowd--strange that Ellen and Clarice should be a part of it--not only out of reach of his live passion, but beyond all speech. Alone in his room he felt suddenly faint for the want of her. He turned off the light with which he had first flooded it, for the flare of the street came feebly in through the summer leafage, and sat sensing the need of her as a thing to be handled and measured, a benumbing, suffocating presence. As he sat, a sound of music floated by, and a thin pencil of light from a pleasure barge on the river flitted from window to window, travelling the gilt line of a picture-frame and the dark block of a picture that hung over his bed. And as it touched in passing the high ramping figure of a knight in armour, the old magic worked. He felt himself flung as it were across great distances, and dizzy with the turn, to her side. He was there to maintain in the face of all worldly reckoning, the excluding, spiritual quality of their relation. The more his engagement to Eunice Goodward failed of being the usual, the expected thing, the more authority it derived for its supernal sources. It took the colour of true romance from its unlikelihood. Peter turned on the light, and drawing paper to him, began to write.

"Lovely Lady," the letter began, and as if the words had been an incantation, the room was full and palpitating with his stored-up dreams. They came waking and crowding to fill out the measure of his unconsummated passion, and they had all one face and one likeness. Late, late he was still going on with it....

"And so," he wrote, "I have come to the part of the story that was not in the picture, that I never knew. The dragon is slain and the knight has just begun to understand that the Princess for whom it was done is still a Princess; and though you have fought and bled for them, princesses must be approached humbly. And he did not know in the least how to go about it for in all his life the knight could never have spoken to one before. You have to think of that when you think of him at all, and of how he must stand even with his heart at her feet, hardly daring to so much as call her attention to it. For though he knows very well that it is quite enough to hope for and more than he deserves, to be able to spend his whole life serving her, love, great love such as one may have for princesses, aches, aches, my dear, and needs a comforting touch sometimes and a word of recognition to make it beat more steadily and more serviceably for every day."

He went out that night to post his letter when it was done, for though there was not time for an answer to it, he was going down to her on Saturday, he liked to think of it running before him as a torch to light the way which, even while he slept, he was so happily traversing. He was quite trembling with the journey he had come, when on Saturday she met him, floating in summer draperies and holding out a slim ringed hand, and a cool cheek to glance past his lips like a swallow.

"You had my letter, dear?"

"Such a lovely letter, Peter, I couldn't think of trying to answer it."

"Oh, it wasn't to be answered--at least not by another----" He released her lest she should be troubled by his trembling.

"I should think not!" She was more than gracious to him. "It's a wonder to me, Peter, you never thought of writing. You have such a beautiful vocabulary." But even that did not daunt him, for he knew as soon as he had looked on her again, that loving Eunice Goodward was enough of an occupation.

V

The senior partner of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., was exactly the sort of man, when his physicians ordered him abroad for two years, with the intimation that there might even worse happen to him, to make so little fuss about it that he got four inches of type in a leading paper the morning of his departure and very little more. Lessing would certainly have been at the steamer to see him off, except for being so much taken up with adjustments of the business made necessary by Peter's going out of it; and his sister Ellen never went out in foggy weather, seldom so far from the house in any case. Besides, she declared that if she once saw Peter disappearing down the widening water she should never be able to rid herself of the notion of his being quite overwhelmed by it, whereas if he sent on his trunks the day before, and walked quietly out in the morning with his suitcase, she could persuade herself that he had merely run down to Bloombury for a few days and would be back on Monday. And having managed his leave-taking as he did most personal matters, to please Ellen, who though she had never been credited with an imagination, seemed likely to develop one in the exigencies of getting along without Peter, he had no sense of having done anything other than to please himself. He found a man to carry his suitcase as soon as he was out of the house, and walked the whole way to the steamer; for if one has been ordered out of all activity there is still a certain satisfaction in going out on your own feet.

It was an extremely ill-considered day, wet fog drawn up to the high shouldering roofs and shrugged off, like a nervous woman's shawl. But whether it sulked over his departure or smiled on him for remembrance, would not have made any difference to Peter, who, whatever the papers said of the reason for his going abroad, knew that there would be neither shade nor shine for him, nor principalities nor powers until he had found again the House of the Shining Walls. As soon as he had bestowed his belongings in his stateroom, he went out on the side of the deck farthest from the groups of leave-taking, and stood staring down, as if he considered whether the straightest route might not lie in that direction, into the greasy, shallow hollows of the harbour water, at the very moment when the Burton Hendersons, over their very late coffee, had discovered the item of his departure.

Mrs. Henderson balanced her spoon on the edge of her cup while her husband read the paragraph aloud to her.

"You don't suppose," she said, as if it might be an interesting even if regrettable possibility, "that _I_--that our affair--had anything to do with it?"

"If it did," admitted her husband, with the air of not thinking it likely, but probably served him right, "it has taken a long time to get at him. Two years, isn't it, since you threw him over for a better man?"

"Oh, I'm not so sure of your being a better man, Bertie; I liked you better----"

Mr. Burton Henderson accepted his wife's amendment with complacency.

"I don't believe Weatheral appreciated the distinction. Men like that have a sort of money crust that prevents the ordinary perceptions from getting through to them." This illustration appeared on second thoughts so illuminating that it carried him a little further. "Perhaps that's the reason it has taken him so long to tumble after he has been hit; it has just got through to him. It would be interesting to know, though, if he is still a little in love with you."

There was a fair amount of speculation in Mr. Burton Henderson's tone that did not appear to have its seat in any apprehension.

"Just as if you rather hoped it," his wife protested.

"Well, I was only wondering if his health is so bad as the papers say--it seldom is, you know--but if he were to go off all of a sudden one of these days, whether he mightn't take it into his head now to leave you a legacy."

"I don't believe it was personal enough with Peter for that. It wasn't me he wanted so much as just to be married. And, besides, I did come down on him rather hard." Mrs. Burton Henderson smiled a little reminiscently as if she still saw herself in the process of coming down on Peter and thought rather well of it.

"Well, anyway," her husband finished, "we could have managed with a legacy."

"Yes, we do need money dreadfully, don't we, Bertie?" she sighed. "But I don't believe I had anything to do with it."

That was all very well for Mrs. Burton Henderson, but Peter's sister Ellen had a different opinion. "Peter," she had said the evening after Peter had sent his trunk out of the house and locked up his suitcase to keep her from putting anything more into it, "you're not thinking of _her_, are you? You're not going to take that abroad with you."

"No, Ellen, I haven't thought of her for a long time except to wish her happiness. You mustn't let that worry you."

"Just the same," said Ellen, "if anything happens to you over there--if you never come back to me, I shall never forgive her."

"I shall come back. I am sorry you should feel so bitter about it."

He could not, especially now that it was gone, very well explain to Ellen about the House; for all the years that it had stood there just beyond the edge of dreams with the garden spread around it and a lovely wood before, she had never heard of it. There had been so many ways to it once, paths to it began in pictures, great towered gates of music gave upon its avenues, and if he had not spoken of it, it was because as he had made himself believe when she did come, that Eunice Goodward would come into it of first right. He could not have blamed her for not wishing to live in it--from the first he had never blamed her. He might have managed even had she pulled it about his ears to rebuild it in some fashion, but this was the bitterest, that he knew now for a certainty there had never been any House and the certainty made him ridiculous.

It had been rather the worse that, with all the suddenness of this discovery, he had not been able to avoid the habit of setting out for it, seeking in dreams the relief of desolation in knowing that no dreams could come. As often as he heard music or saw in the soft turn of a cheek or the slender line of a wrist, what had moved him so in hers he felt himself urged forward on old trails, only to be scared from them by the apparition of himself as Eunice had evoked it from her bright surpassing surfaces, as a man unaccomplished in passion, unprovocative. All the gates to the House opened upon dreadful hollows of self-despising into which Peter fell and floundered, so that he took to going that way as little as possible, taking wide circuits about it continually in the way of business, being rather pleased with himself when at the end of two years he could no longer feel any pang of loss nor any remembering thrill of what the House had been--until he discovered that also he could not feel some other things, the pen between his fingers and the rise of the stairs under him. He forgot Eunice Goodward, and then one day he forgot to go home after office hours, and they found him sitting still at his desk in the dark, trying to remember whether he ought to put down the blotting-pad and the paper weight on top of that, or if, on the whole, it were not better to put the paper weight, as being the heavier article, first.

It was after that the doctor told him to go as far away from his business as possible and keep on staying away.

"But if I am going to die, doctor," Peter carefully explained, "I would much rather do it in my own country."

"Ah," the doctor warned him, "that's just the difficulty. You won't die."

And that was how Peter happened to be leaning over the forward rail of an Atlantic steamer on his way to Italy, which he had chosen because the date of sailing happened to be convenient. But he knew, as he stood looking down at the surface of the water, rough-hewn by the wind, that whatever the doctor said to Lessing, or Ellen surmised, he would get no good there except as it showed him the way to the House of the Shining Walls.

He did not remember where in the blind pointless ring through which the steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water beetle and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get sufficiently acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that they were most of them going abroad in the interest of unrealized estates, and abounded in confidence. To see them forever forward and agaze at the lit shores of Spain and the Islands of Desire, roused in him the faint savour of expectation. Which, however, did not prevent him from finding Naples squalid, and Rome, where he arrived in the middle of the tourist season, too modern in a cheap, second-rate sort of way. He could remember when Rome had furnished some excellent company for the House, and suffered in the places of renown an indeterminable pang like the ache of an amputated stump. It seemed, on occasion, as if the old trails might lie down the hollow of the Forum, under the arch of that broken aqueduct, beside the dark Volsinian mere; but when Peter arrived at any of these places he found them prepossessed by Germans gabbling out of _Baedekers_. The Sistine Chapel made the back of his neck ache and he came no nearer than seven tourists to the noble quietude of the Vatican can marbles.

"I must remember," said Peter to himself, "that I am a very sick man, and crowds annoy me."

Then he went into the country and saw the gray of the olives above the springing grass, like the silver bloom on a green plum, and began to experience the pangs of recovery. He found Hadrian's Villa and the garden of the Villa d'Este, and remembered other things. He remembered the flat malachite-coloured pools, the definite, pointed cypresses and the fountain's soft incessant rain--as it had been in the House. As it _was_ in the House. For he understood in Italy what was still the most bitter to know, that though it might yet be somewhere in the world, he was never to find it any more. Toward all that once had led him thither, his sense was locked and sealed. He remembered Eunice Goodward--the fact of her--how tall she was as she walked beside him--but not how at the soft brushing of her hair as she turned, his blood had sung to her; nor all the weeks of their engagement like a morning full of wings. And he could not yet recall so much as the bare reasons for her break with him except that they had been unhappy ones.

It had been a part of a long plan that he and Eunice should have seen Italy together, but for the moment he did not wish her there. He was sure she would have been in the way of his getting something that glimmered at him from the coign of castellated walls all awash about their base with purpled shadow, that strove to say itself in intricate fine tracery of tower and shrine, and failed and fell away before the sodden quality of his mind.

So he drifted northward with the spring, and saw the anemones blowing and the bloomy violet wonder the world, suffering incredible aching intimations of the recrudescence of desire. Afterward he came to Florence, where he had heard there were pictures, and hoped to have some peace; but at Florence they were all too busy being painted or prayed to, the remote Madonnas, the wounded Saints, the comfortable plump Venuses; the lean Christs too stupefied with candle smoke to take any account of an American gentleman in a plain business suit, who looked homely and ill and competent. Sometimes in Santa Croce or in the long gallery over the bridge, the noise of the city would remove from him and the faces would waver and lean out of their frames, as if, had the occasion allowed, they would have said the word to set him on his way. But there was always a guard about or a tourist stalking some uncatalogued prey and it never came to anything.

"What you really want," said a man at his hotel to whom he had half whimsically complained of their inarticulateness--one of those remarkable individuals who had done nothing so successfully in so many cities of Europe that he was supposed to know the exact month for doing it most delightfully in any one of them--"what you really want is Venice. It's an off season there; you'll meet nobody but Germans, and if you go about in your own gondola you needn't mind them."

So Peter went to Venice, and on the way there he met the Girl from Home.

VI

He knew at once that she was from Home, though as she sat opposite him with the fingers of her mended gloves laced under her chin and her face turned away to miss no point of the cypresses and warm, illumined walls, there was nothing to prove that any one of a hundred towns might not have produced her. Peter remembered what sort of people wore gloves like that in Bloombury--the minister's wife, the school teacher, his mother and Ellen--and was instantly sure she would not have been travelling through Italy first-class except at the instigation of the large, widowed and distrustful woman with whom she got on at Padua. This lady, also, Peter understood very well. He thought it likely she sat in rocking chairs a great deal at home and travelled to improve her mind. She had, moreover, a general air of proclaiming the unwarrantableness of railway acquaintances, which alone would have prevented Peter from asking the girl, as he absurdly wanted to, if they had painted the new school-house yet, and if there had been much water that year in Miller's pond.

As she sat so with her round hat pushed askew by the window-glass, there was some delicate reminder about her that streaked the rich Italian landscape with vestiges of Bloombury.

He looked out of the window where she looked and saw the white straight-sided villas change to green-shuttered farmhouses, and fine old Roman roads lead on to Harmony. It was all there for him in its unexpectedness, as freshly touching as those reminders of his mother which he came upon occasionally where Ellen kept them laid by in lavender; as if the girl had shaken from the folds of her jacket of unmistakable Bloombury cut, Youth for him--his own--anybody's Youth--no limp and yellowed keepsake, but all crisply done up and ready for putting on. So sharp for the moment was his sense of accepting the invitation to put it on with her as the best possible traveller's guise, especially for seeing Venice in, that catching the speculative eye of the large lady turned upon him, he quailed sensibly. She had the air of having detected him in an attempt to establish a relation with her companion on the ground of their common youngness, and finding herself much more a match for him both in years and in respect to their common origin. Whatever passed between the two women, and something did pass wordlessly, with hardly so much substance as a look, remained there, not intrusively, but as proof that what he had been seeking was still going on in some far but attainable place. It was the first movement of an accomplished recovery, for Peter to find himself resisting the implication of his appearance in favour of what was coming to him out of the retouched, sensitive surfaces of his past.

He knew so well as he looked at the girl, what had produced her. She was leaning a little from the window in a way that brought more of her face into view, and though from where he sat Peter could have very little notion of the points of the nearing landscape, he knew by what he saw of her, that somewhere across the low runnels in the windy reeds she had caught sight of the "sea birds' nest."

He did not on that account change his position so that he might have a glimpse of the dark hills of Arqua or the towers of Venice repeating themselves in the lustrous, spacious sea. Sitting opposite the girl, he saw in her following eyes the silver trails of water and the dim procession down them of old loves, old wars, old splendours, much better than the thin line of the landscape presented them to his weary sense. He leaned back as far as the stiff seat allowed, watching the Old World shine on her face, where the low light, striking obliquely on the water, turned it white above black shoals of weed. For the first time since his illness his mind slipped the leash of maimed desire, and as if it parted for him there beyond the window of the railway carriage, struck into the trail to the House. The walls of it rose up straight and shining, gilded purely; the windows arching to summer blueness, let in with them the smell of the wilding rose at the turn of the road and the evening clamour of the birds in Bloombury wood.

All this time Peter had been sitting in an Italian railway carriage, knee to knee with a pirate bearded Austrian Jew who gave him the greatest possible occasion for wishing the window opened, and when the jar of the checked train drew him into consciousness again, he was at a loss to know what had set him off so far until he caught sight of the girl. She was buttoning on her jacket with fingers that trembled with excitement as she constrained herself to the recapitulation of the two suitcases, the hat box and three parcels which her companion in order to have well in hand, had been alternately picking up and dropping ever since they sighted the tower of San Georgio dark against the sea streaked west.

"Two and one is three and three is six and the _'Baedeker'_ and the umbrellas," said the girl. "No, I don't have to look in the address book. I have it by heart. Casa Frolli, the Zattera." Then the roar of the train split into the sharp cries of the _facchinos_ that carried them forward like an explosion into Venice as it rose statelily from the rippling lustre. Around it wove the black riders with still, communicating prows, so buoyant, so mysteriously alive and peering, like some superior sea creatures risen magically from below the frayed reflection of the station lights. Much as Peter felt that he owed to the vivid presence of the girl, his new capacity to see and feel it so as it burst upon them, he hadn't found the courage to address her. So it was with a distinct sense of deprivation that he saw her with her companion grasping the side of the gondola as if by that method to keep it afloat, disappearing down the dim water lanes in the direction of the Zattera.

VII

It was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at the _Britania_, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever interested him.

It did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of Venice, that he had not thought once of Eunice Goodward, but only of those who had touched his life without hurting it. He was so far indeed from thinking of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet her again.

"I must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."

He looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals, for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round hat who might have come from Bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the day after, and in the meantime Venice took him.

The ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. It was, as he told himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him, that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his dreams, missed them both on his own account.

It was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of Venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty droves of doves. High over the door the gold horses of Lysippus breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approaching _temporale_. He was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as it had been in the House!

It was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. He climbed up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which had failed to preserve to him any image of how his father looked, and yet had so furnished all his imagination. Which didn't make any less of a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, Peter Weatheral, of the firm of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Real Estate Brokers, what it was all about.

"It's a picture-book of the heart of man," he concluded, and no sooner had he shaped this thought in his mind than he heard it uttered for him on the opposite side of the pillar in a voice made soft by indulgent tenderness, "Just a great picture-book." He leaned forward at the sound far enough to have a glimpse of the Girl from Home, and smiled at her.

"So you've found that out, have you?" It was not strange to find himself addressing her friendlily nor to hear her answer him.

"Just a picture-book," she repeated. "It explains so much. What the saints were to them, and the Holy Personages. Monkish tales to prey upon their superstition, we were taught. But you can see here what they really were, the wonder tales of a people, the fairy wonder and the blessed happenings come true as they do in dreams. Oh, it must have been a good time when the saints were on the earth."

"You believe in them, then?"

"Here in San Marco, yes. But not when I am in Bloombury."

"Oh!" cried Peter, "are you really from Bloombury? I knew you were from up country but I hardly dared to hope--if you will permit me----" He searched for his card which she accepted without looking at it.

"You are Mr. Peter Weatheral, aren't you? Mrs. Merrithew thought she recognized you yesterday."

"Is that why she glared at me so? But anyway I am obliged to her, though I haven't vestige of a recollection of her."

"She didn't suppose you had. Her husband sold you some land once. But of course everybody in Bloombury knows the Mr. Weatheral who went from there to the city and made his fortune."

"A sorry one," said Peter. "But if you are really from Bloombury why don't I remember you? I go there with Ellen every summer, and _she_ knows everybody."

"Yes; she is so kind. Everybody says that. But I'm really from Harmony. I taught the Bloombury school last year. I am Savilla Dassonville."

"Oh, I knew your father then! Now that I come to think of it, it was he who laid the foundation of my greatness," Peter smiled whimsically. "And I knew your mother; she was a very lovely lady."

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 Shining 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 mass 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 Dassonville, "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.