Chapter II: Book I: The Children (2)

He slipped his hand through Judith’s arm, and drew her across the cloister and into the great echoing basilica. At first, after their long session on the sun-drenched terrace, the place seemed veiled in an impenetrable twilight. But gradually the tremendous walls and spandrils began to glow with their own supernatural radiance, the solid sunlight of gold and umber and flame-coloured mosaics, against which figures of saints, prophets, kings and sages stood out in pale solemn hues. Boyne led the girl toward one of the shafts of the nave, and they sat down on its projecting base.

“Now from here you can see—”

But he presently perceived that she could see nothing. Her little profile was studiously addressed to the direction in which he pointed, and her head thrown back so that her lips were parted, and her long lashes drew an upward curve against her pale skin; but nothing was happening in the face which was usually the theatre of such varied emotions.

She sat thus for a long time, and he did not move or speak again. Finally she turned to him, and said in a shy voice (it was the first time he had noticed any shyness in her): “I suppose I’m much more ignorant than you could possibly have imagined.”

“You mean that you don’t particularly care for all this?”

She lowered her voice to answer: “I believe all those big people up there frighten me a little.” And she added: “I’m glad I didn’t bring Chip.”

“Child!” He let his hand fall on hers with a faint laugh. What a child she became as soon as she was away from the other children!

“But I do want to admire it, you know,” she went on earnestly, “because you do, and Scopy says you know such a lot about everything.”

“It’s not a question of knowing—” he began; and then broke off. For wasn’t it, after all, exactly that? How many thousand threads of association, strung with stored images of the eye and brain, memories of books, of pictures, of great names and deeds, ran between him and those superhuman images, tracing a way from his world to theirs? Yes; it had been stupid of him to expect that a child of fifteen or sixteen, brought up in complete ignorance of the past, and with no more comprehension than a savage of the subtle and allusive symbolism of art, should feel anything in Monreale but the oppression of its awful unreality. And yet he was disappointed, for he was already busy at the masculine task of endowing the woman of the moment with every quality which made life interesting to himself.

“Woman—but she’s not a woman! She’s a child.” His thinking of her as anything else was the crowning absurdity of the whole business. Obscurely irritated with himself and her, he stood up, turning his back impatiently on the golden abyss of the apse. “Come along; it’s chilly here after our sun-bath. Gardens are best, after all.”

In the doorway she paused a moment and sent her gaze a little wistfully down the mighty perspective they were leaving. “Some day, I know, I shall want to come back here,” she said.

“Oh, well, we’ll come back together,” he replied perfunctorily.

But outside in the sunlight, with the children leaping about her, and guiding her with joyful cries toward the outspread tea-things, she was instantly woman again—gay, competent, composed, and wholly mistress of the situation....

Yes; decidedly, the more Boyne saw of her the more she perplexed him, the more difficult he found it to situate her in time and space. He did not even know how old she was—somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, he conjectured—nor had he as yet made up his mind if she were pretty. In the cathedral, just now, he had thought her almost plain, with the dull droop of her mouth, her pale complexion which looked dead when unlit by gaiety, her thick brown hair, just thick and just brown, without the magic which makes some women’s hair as alive as their lips, and her small impersonal nose, a nose neither perfectly drawn like Blanca’s nor impudently droll like Zinnie’s. The act of thus cataloguing her seemed to reduce her to a bundle of negatives; yet here in the sunshine, her hat thrown off her rumpled hair, and all the children scrambling over her, her mouth became a flame, her eyes fountains of laughter, her thin frail body a quiver of light—he didn’t know how else to put it. Whatever she was, she was only intermittently; as if her body were the mere vehicle of her moods, the projection of successive fears, hopes, ardours, with hardly any material identity of its own. Strange, he mused, that such an imponderable and elusive creature should be the offspring of the two solid facts he recalled the Cliffe Wheaters as being. For a reminder of Joyce Mervin as he had known her, tall, vigorous and substantial, one must turn to Blanca, not Judith. If Blanca had not had to spare a part of herself for the making of Terry she would have been the reproduction of her mother. But Judith was like a thought, a vision, an aspiration—all attributes to which Mrs. Cliffe Wheater could never have laid claim. And Boyne, when the tired and sleepy party were piled once more into the motor, had not yet decided what Judith looked like, and still less if he really thought her pretty.

He fell asleep that night composing a letter to the lady in the Dolomites. “... what you would think. A strange little creature who changes every hour, hardly seems to have any personality of her own except when she’s mothering her flock. Then she’s extraordinary: playmate, mother and governess all in one; and the best of each in its way. As for her very self, when she’s not with them, you grope for her identity and find an instrument the wind plays on, a looking-glass that reflects the clouds, a queer little sensitive plate, very little and very sensitive—” and with a last flash of caution, just as sleep overcame him, he added: “Unluckily not in the least pretty.”

V

“I’m so much interested in your picturesque description of the little-girl-mother (sounds almost as nauseating as ‘child-wife,’ doesn’t it?) who is conducting that heterogeneous family across Europe, while the parents are jazzing at Venice. What an instance of modern manners; no, not manners—there are none left—but customs! I’m sure if I saw the little creature I should fall in love with her—as you are obviously doing. Luckily you’ll be parting soon, or I should expect to see you arrive here with the girl-bride of the movies and a tribe of six (or is it seven?) adopted children. Don’t imagine, though, that in that case I should accept the post of governess.” And then, p.s.: “Of course she’s awfully pretty, or you wouldn’t have taken so much pains to say that she’s not.”

One of Rose Sellars’s jolly letters: clever, understanding and humorous. Why did Boyne feel a sudden flatness in it? Something just a trifle mincing, self-conscious—prepared? Yes; if Mrs. Sellars excelled in one special art it was undoubtedly that of preparation. She led up to things—the simplest things—with the skill of a clever rider putting a horse at a five-barred gate. All her life had been a series of adaptations, arrangements, shifting of lights, lowering of veils, pulling about of screens and curtains. No one could arrange a room half so well; and she had arranged herself and her life just as skilfully. The material she had had to deal with was poor enough; in every way unworthy of her; but, as her clever hands could twist a scarf into a divan-cover, and ruffle a bit of paper into a lamp-shade, so she had managed, out of mediocre means, a mediocre husband, an ugly New York house, and a dull New York set, to make something distinguished, personal, almost exciting—so that, in her little world, people were accustomed to say “Rose Sellars” as a synonym for cleverness and originality.

Yes; she had had the art to do that, and to do it quietly, unobtrusively, by a touch here, a hint there, without ever reaching out beyond her domestic and social frame-work. Her originality, in the present day, lay in this consistency and continuity. It was what had drawn Boyne to her in the days of his big wanderings, when, returning from an arduous engineering job in Rumania or Brazil or Australia, he would find, in his ever-shifting New York, the one fixed pole of Mrs. Sellars’s front door, always the same front door at the same number of the same street, with the same Whistler etchings and Sargent water-colours on the drawing-room walls, and the same quiet welcome to the same fireside.

In his homeless years that sense of her stability had appealed to him peculiarly: the way, each time he returned, she had simply added a little more to herself, like a rose unfurling another petal. A rose in full sun would have burst into quicker bloom; it was part of Mrs. Sellars’s case that she had always, as Heine put it, been like a canary in a window facing north. Not due north, however, but a few points north by west; so that she caught, not the sun’s first glow, but its rich decline. He could never think of her as having been really young, immaturely young, like this girl about whom they were exchanging humorous letters, and who, in certain other ways, had a precocity of experience so far beyond Mrs. Sellars’s. But the question of a woman’s age was almost always beside the point. When a man loved a woman she was always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was either too old for witchery or too young for technique. “And five years is too long a time,” he summed it up again, with a faint return of the apprehension he always felt when he thought of his next meeting with Mrs. Sellars.

Five years was too long; and these five, in particular, had transformed the situation, and perhaps its heroine. It was a new Rose Sellars whom he was to meet. When they had parted she was still a wife—resigned, exemplary, and faithful in spite of his pleadings; now she was a widow. The word was full of disturbing implications, and Boyne had already begun to wonder how much of her attraction had been due to the fact that she was unattainable. It was all very well to say that he “wasn’t that kind of man”—the kind to tire of a woman as soon as she could be had. That was all just words; in matters of sex and sentiment, as he knew, a man was a different kind of man in every case that presented itself. Only by going to the Dolomites to see her could he really discover what it was that he had found so haunting in Rose Sellars. So he was going.

“Mr. Boyne—could we have a quiet talk, do you think?”

Boyne, driven from the deck by the heat and glare, and the activities of the other passengers, was lying on his bed, book in hand, in a state of after-luncheon apathy. His small visitor leaned in the doorway, slender and gray-clad: Terry Wheater, with the faint pinkness on his cheek-bones, the brilliance in his long-lashed eyes, that made his honest boy’s face at times so painfully beautiful.

“Why, of course, old man. Come in. You’ll be better off here than on deck till it gets cooler.”

Terry tossed aside his cap and dropped into the chair at Boyne’s bedside. They had shared a cabin for nearly a fortnight, and reached the state of intimacy induced by such nearness when it does not result in hate; but Boyne had had very few chances to talk with the boy. Terry was always asleep when the older man turned in, and Boyne himself was up and out long before Terry, kept in bed by the vigilant Miss Scope, had begun his leisurely toilet. Boyne, by now, had formed a fairly clear idea of the characteristics of the various young Wheaters, but Terry was perhaps the one with whom he had spent the least time; and the boy’s rather solemn tone, and grown-up phraseology, made him lay aside his book with a touch of curiosity.

“What can I do for you, Terry?”

“Persuade them that I ought to have a tutor.”

“Them?”

“I mean the Wheaters—father and mother,” Terry corrected himself. The children, Boyne knew, frequently referred to their parents by their surname. The habit of doing so, Miss Scope had explained, rose from the fact that, in the case of most of the playmates of their wandering life, the names “father” and “mother” had to be applied, successively or simultaneously, to so many different persons; indeed one surprising little girl with black curls and large pearl earrings, whom they had met the year before at Biarritz, had the habit of handing to each new playmate a typed table of her parents’ various marriages and her own successive adoptions. “So they all do it now; that is, speak of their different sets of parents by their names. And my children have picked up the habit from the others, though in their own case, luckily, it’s no longer necessary, now that their papa and mamma have come together again.”

“I mean father and mother,” Terry repeated. “Make them understand that I must be educated. There’s no time to lose. And _you_ could.” His eyes were fixed feverishly—alas, too feverishly—on Boyne’s, and his face had the air of precocious anxiety which sometimes made Judith look so uncannily mature.

“My dear chap—of course I’ll do anything I can for you. But I don’t believe I shall be seeing your people this time. I’m going to jump into the train the minute we get to Venice.”

The boy’s face fell. “You are? I’m sorry. And Judy will be awfully sold.”

“That’s very good of her—and of you. But you see—”

“Oh, I can see that a solid fortnight of the lot of us is a good deal for anybody,” Terry acquiesced. “All the same, Judy and I did hope you’d stay in Venice for a day or two. We thought, you see, there were a good many things you could do for us.”

Boyne continued to consider him thoughtfully. “I should be very glad if I could. But I’m afraid you overrate my influence. I haven’t seen your parents for years. They’d hardly remember me.”

“That’s just it: you’d be a novelty,” said Terry astutely.

“Well—if that’s an inducement.... Anyhow, you may be sure I’ll do what I can ... if I find I can alter my plans....”

“Oh, if you could! You see I’ve really never had anybody to speak for me. Scopy cuts no ice with them, and of course they think Judy’s too young to know about education—specially as she’s never had any herself. She can’t even spell, you know. She writes stomach with a _k_. And they’ve let me go on like this, just with nurses and nursery-governesses (that’s really all Scopy is), as if I wasn’t any older than Bun, when I’m at an age when most fellows are leaving their preparatory schools.” The boy’s face coloured with the passion of his appeal, and the flush remained in two sharp patches on his cheeks.

“Of course,” he went on, “Judy says I’m not fair to them—that I don’t remember what a lot they’ve had to spend for me on doctors and climate, and all that. And they did send me to school once, and I had to be taken away because of my beastly temperature.... I know all that. But it _was_ a sell, when I left school, just to come back again to Scopy and Nanny, and nobody a fellow could put a question to, or get a tip from about what other fellows are learning. Last summer, at St. Moritz, I met a boy not much older than I am who was rather delicate too, and he’d just got a new father who was a great reader, and who had helped him no end, and got a tutor for him; and he’d started Cæsar, and was getting up his Greek verbs—with a temperature every evening too. And I said to Judy: ‘Now, look at that.’ And she said, yes, it would be splendid for me to have a tutor. And for two weeks the other fellow’s father let me work a little with him. But then we had to go away—one of our troubles,” Terry interrupted himself, “is that we’re so everlastingly going away. But I suppose it’s always so with children—isn’t it?—with all the different parents they’re divided up among, and all the parents living in different places, and fighting so about when the children are to go to which, and the lawyers always changing things just as you think they’re arranged.... Of course a chap must expect to be moving about when he’s young. But Scopy says that later parents settle down.” He added this on a note of interrogation, and Boyne, feeling that an answer was expected, declared with conviction: “Oh, but they do—by Jove, they do!”

Inwardly he was recalling the warm cocoon of habit in which his own nursery and school years had been enveloped, giving time for a screen of familiar scenes and faces to form itself about him before he was thrust upon the world. What had struck Boyne first about the little tribe generically known as the Wheaters was that they were so exposed, so bared to the blast—as if they had missed some stage of hidden growth for which Palace Hotels and Riviera Expresses afforded no sufficient shelter. He found his gaze unable to bear the too-eager questioning of the boy’s, and understood why Miss Scope looked away when she talked of Terry.

“Settle down? Rather! People naturally tend to as they get older. Aren’t your own parents proving it already? Haven’t you all got together again, so to speak?” Boyne winced at his own exaggerated tone of optimism. It was a delicate matter, in such cases, to catch exactly the right note.

“Yes,” Terry assented. “You’d think so. But I know children who’ve thought so too, and been jolly well sold. The trouble is you can never be sure when parents will really begin to feel old. Especially with all these new ways the doctors have of making them young again. But anyhow,” he went on more hopefully, “if you would put in a word I’m sure it would count a lot. And Judy is sure it would too.”

“Then of course I will. I’ll stop over a day or two, and do all I can,” Boyne assured him, casting plans and dates to the winds.

He was not certain that the appeal had not anticipated a secret yearning of his own; a yearning not so much to postpone his arrival at Cortina (to that he would not confess) as to defer the parting from his new friends, and especially from Judith. The Monreale picnic had been successfully repeated in several other scenes of classic association, and during the gay and clamorous expeditions ashore, and the long blue days on deck, he had been gradually penetrated by the warm animal life which proceeds from a troop of happy healthy children. Everything about the little Wheaters and their “steps” excited his interest and sympathy, and not least the frailness of the tie uniting them, and their determination that it should not be broken. There was something tragic, to Boyne, in the mere fact of this determination—it implied a range of experience and a power of forethought so far beyond a child’s natural imagining. To the ordinary child, Boyne’s memories told him, separation means something too vague to fret about beforehand, and too pleasantly tempered, when it comes, by the excitement of novelty, and the joy of release from routine, to be anything but a jolly adventure. Boyne could not recall that he had ever minded being sent from home (to the seashore, to a summer camp, or to an aunt’s, when a new baby was expected) as long as he was allowed to take his mechanical toys with him. Any place that had a floor on which you could build cranes and bridges and railways was all right: if there was a beach with sand that could be trenched and tunnelled, and water that could be dammed, then it was heaven, even if the porridge wasn’t as good as it was at home, and there was no mother to read stories aloud after supper.

He could only conjecture that what he called change would have seemed permanence to the little Wheaters, and that what change signified to them was something as radical and soul-destroying as it would have been to Boyne to see his mechanical toys smashed, or his white mice left to die of hunger. That it should imply a lasting separation from the warm cluster of people, pets and things called home, would have been no more thinkable to the infant Boyne than permanence was to the infant Wheaters.

Judith had explained that almost all their little friends (usually acquaintances made in the world of Palace Hotels) were in the same case as themselves. As Terry had put it, when you were young you couldn’t expect not to move about; and when Judith proceeded to give Boyne some of the reasons which had leagued her little tribe against the recurrence of such moves he had the sick feeling with which a powerless looker-on sees the torture of an animal. The case of poor Doll Westway, for instance, who was barely a year older than Judith, and whom they had played with for a summer at Deauville; and now—!

Well, it was all a damned rotten business—that was what it was. And Judith’s resolve that her children should never again be exposed to these hazards thrilled Boyne like the gesture of a Joan of Arc. As the character of each became more definite to him, as he measured the distance between Blanca’s cool self-absorption, tempered only by a nervous craving for her twin brother’s approval, and the prodigal self-abandonment of Beechy, as he compared the detached and downright Zinnie to the sinuous and selfish Bun, and watched the interplay of all these youthful characters, he marvelled that the bond of Judith Wheater’s love for them should be stronger than the sum of such heredities. But so it was. He had seen how they could hang together against their sister when some childish whim united them, and now he could imagine what an impenetrable front they would present under her leadership. Of course the Cliffe Wheaters would stay together if their children were determined that they should; and of course they would give Terry a tutor if he wanted one. How was it possible for any one to look at Terry and not give him what he wanted, Boyne wondered? At any rate, he, Boyne, meant to accompany the party to Venice and see the meeting. Incidentally, he was beginning to be curious about seeing the Wheaters themselves.

VI

There was no doubt about the Wheaters’ welcome. When Boyne entered the big hall of their hotel on the Grand Canal he instantly recognized Cliffe Wheater in the florid figure which seemed to fill the half-empty resonant place with its own exuberance. Cliffe Wheater had been just like that at Harvard. The only difference was that he and his cigar had both grown bigger. And he seemed to have as little difficulty in identifying Boyne.

“Hul_lo_!” he shouted, so that the hall rocked with his greeting, and the extremely slim young lady in a Quaker gray frock and endless pearls to whom he was talking turned her head toward the newcomer with a little pout of disdain. The pout lingered as her eyes rested on Boyne, but he perceived that it was not personally addressed to him. She had a smooth egg-shaped face as sweetly vacuous as that of the wooden bust on which Boyne’s grandmother’s caps used to be done up, with carmine lips of the same glossy texture, and blue-gray eyes with long lashes that curved backward (like the bust’s) as though they were painted on her lids; and Boyne had the impression that her extreme repose of manner was due to the fear of disturbing this facial harmony.

“Why, Martin dear!” she presently breathed in a low level voice, putting out a hand heavy with rings; and Boyne understood that he was in the presence of the once-redundant Joyce Wheater, and that in her new fashion she was as glad to see him as ever.

“I’ve grown so old that you didn’t recognise me; but I should have known _you_ anywhere!” she reproached him in the same smooth silvery voice.

“Old—you?” he found himself stammering; but the insipidities she evidently awaited were interrupted by her husband.

“Know him? I should say so! Not an ounce more flesh on him than there used to be, after all these years: how d’yer do it, I wonder? Great old times we used to have in the groves of John Harvard, eh, Martin, my boy? ’Member that Cambridge girl you used to read poetry to? _Poetry!_ She was a looker, too! ‘Come into the garden, Maud’.... _Garden_ they used to call it in those days! And now I hear you’re a pal of my son’s.... Well, no, I don’t mean Chipstone—” he smiled largely— “but poor old Terry.... Hullo, why here’s the caravan! Joyce, I say—you’ve told them they’re to be parked out at the _Pension Grimani_? All but Chip, that is. Can’t part with Chipstone, can we? Here they all come, Judy in the lead as usual. Hullo, Judy girl! Chippo, old man, how goes it? Give us your fist, my son.” He caught his last-born out of Judith’s arms, and the others had to wait, a little crestfallen, yet obviously unsurprised, till the proud father had filled his eyes with the beauty of his last achievement. “Catch on to him, will you, Joyce? Look at old man Chippo! Must have put on another five pounds since our last meeting—I swear he has ... you just feel this calf of his! Hard as a tennis ball, it is.... Does you no end of credit, Judy. Here, pass him on to the room next to your mother’s.... Wish you’d develop that kind of calf, Terry boy....”

“Look at _my_ calfs, too! I can show them upside down!” shouted Bun, bursting in with a handspring upon these endearments; while Blanca, wide-eyed and silent, fastened her absorbed gaze on the golden thatch of her mother’s intricately rippled head, and Joyce clasped the children, one after another, to her pearls.

Give Terry a tutor? Boy’s own idea, was it? Good old chap—always poking around with books. Wheater would have thought that Terry knew enough to be his own tutor by this time.... Funny, wasn’t it, for a son of _his_? Cut out to be a Doctor of Divinity; or President of a University, maybe! Talk of heredity—for him and Joyce to have turned out such a phenomenon! Hoped Chipstone wouldn’t turn into a Doctor of Divinity too. But of course they’d give Terry a tutor—wouldn’t they, Joyce? The boy was dead right; he couldn’t be loafing about any longer with the women.... Did Boyne happen to know of a tutor, by any chance? Wheater’d never before had anything of the sort to bother about. Right up on schools, of course—always meant to send Terry to Groton; but his rotten temperature had knocked that out, so now....

The three were sitting after dinner on the balcony of the Wheaters’ apartment, watching the Grand Canal, gondola-laden, lamp-flecked, furrowed with darting motor-boats, drift beneath them in rich coils and glassy volutes. There was nothing doing in Venice, Wheater had explained, so early in the season; it was as dead as the grave. Just a handy place to meet the children in, and look them over before they were packed off to the Engadine or Leysin. And besides, the Wheaters had come there to pick up their new steam-yacht; the “Fancy Girl,” a real beauty. They were going on a short cruise in her before they left for Cowes, and Venice was a handy place to try her out. By-and-by, if Boyne liked, he and Joyce and Wheater might drift out to the Piazza, and take an ice at Florian’s, and a turn on the Canal—not very exciting, but the best Wheater could suggest in the circumstances. But Boyne said: why not stay where they were? And Joyce, with a shrug that just sufficiently displaced the jet strap attaching her dress to her white shoulder, remarked that Cliffe never _could_ stay where he was, but that nobody objected to his painting Venice red if he wanted to....

“Where’d I get the paint, at this time of year? Nobody here but guys with guide-books, and old maids being photo’d feeding the pigeons.... Hotels cram full of ’em.... Well, look here; about that tutor? You haven’t come across anybody on your travels that would do, Martin? University chap, and that sort of thing?”

Martin didn’t believe he had; but Mrs. Wheater, lifting a white arm to flick her cigarette into the Canal, said: “_I_ know a tutor.”

“Hell—you _do_?” her husband laughed incredulously. “’Nother cigar, old chap? These Coronas ain’t bad—specially made for me.” He loosed the golden sheathings from a cigar and held his lighter to it.

“I know a tutor,” Mrs. Wheater repeated. “Exactly the right person, if only we can persuade him to take the job.”

“Well—I’ll be blowed! Where’d you excavate him?”

She was silent for a moment; then she said: “I’ve been going to the galleries with him. It’s the first time I’ve ever _seen_ Venice. Fanny Tradeschi got him out from England to tutor her boys, and then she was bored here, and rushed back to Paris, and left him stranded. His name is Ormerod—Gerald Ormerod. It would be the greatest privilege for Terry if he could be persuaded....”

“Oh, I guess I can persuade him all right. I don’t believe Fanny remembered to settle with him before she left.”

“No, she didn’t; but he’s awfully proud. You’d better not take that tone with him, Cliffe.”

“What; the tone of asking him what his screw is?”

“Shouting like that at the top of your lungs—as if everybody less rich than yourself was deaf,” said his wife, with a slight steel edge in her silver voice.

“Hul_lo_! That the size of it? Well, fix it up with him any old way you like. I’m off for a round of the town.... Not coming along, Martin? Well, so long.... Can’t for the life of me see why you’ve stuck yourself down at that frowsy _pension_ with the children; I’m sure I could have bullied the manager here into giving you a room.... Have it your own way, though. And you and Joyce can map out a tour for to-morrow: only no galleries for me, thank you! Look here—d’ye think I’d disturb Chipstone Wheater Esqre if I was just to poke my head in and take a look at him on my way out? Listen—my shoes don’t creak the least bit.... Oh, hang it, I don’t care, I’m going to, anyway....”

Of the Joyce Mervin of Boyne’s youth, the young Joyce Wheater of her early married days, nothing, apparently, was left in the slim figure leaning over the balcony at Boyne’s elbow. Then she had been large, firm and rosy, with a core of artless sensibility; now she seemed to have gone through some process of dematerialization (no doubt there were specialists for this too) which had left a translucent and imponderable body about a hard little kernel of spirit.

“It’s impossible to make Cliffe feel _nuances_,” she murmured to her cigarette after Wheater had gone; then, turning to Boyne: “But now we can have a good talk—just like old times, can’t we?” She settled down in her armchair, and exchanged her measured syllables for a sort of steely volubility which rattled about Boyne’s head like a hail of _confetti_. She was awfully glad to see him, really she was, she declared; he _did_ believe her when she said that, didn’t he? He’d always been such a perfect friend, in the silly old days when she herself was just a stupid baby, years younger in experience than Judy was now.... What did Martin think of Judy, by the way? Did he appreciate what a miracle the child was? Positively, she was older and wiser than any of them; and the only human being who had any influence whatever with Cliffe....

Oh, well: Cliffe ... yes.... It was awfully dear and sweet of Martin to say that he was glad she and Cliffe had come together again, and she was glad too, and she was ever so proud of Chip, and she _did_ recognize poor Cliffe’s qualities, she always had, even when things were at their worst ... but, there, it was no use pretending with Martin, it never had been; and there was no denying that Cliffe had got into dreadfully bad hands when she left him ... utterly demoralized and cowed by that beastly Lacrosse woman ... and the money pouring out like water.... Yes, she, Joyce, had seen it was her duty to take him back; and so she had. Because she still believed in the sanctity of marriage, in spite of everything. She hoped Martin did too? For if you didn’t, what was there left to hold society together? But all the same, if one came to feel that by living with a man, even if he _was_ one’s husband, one was denying one’s Ideal: that was awful too, wasn’t it? Didn’t Martin think it was awful?

Yes, Martin supposed it was; but he rather thought a bunch of jolly children were a pretty good substitute for any old Ideal he’d ever met. Mrs. Wheater laughed, with somewhat more of the old resonance, and said she thought so too, and that was what Judy had argued—no, Martin would never know how wonderful Judy had been during the ghastly days when Buondelmonte was dragging her, Joyce, through the mire, literally through the mire! “Why, there were things I couldn’t tell even _you_, Martin—”

Martin felt his gorge rise. “Things I hope that Judy wasn’t told, then?”

Mrs. Wheater’s shoulder again slipped its light trammels in a careless shrug. “Bless you, you don’t have to tell the modern child things! They seem to be born knowing them. Haven’t you found that out, you dear old Rip van Winkle? Why, Judy’s like a mother to me, I assure you.”

“She’s got a pretty big family to mother, hasn’t she?” Boyne rejoined, and Mrs. Wheater sighed contentedly: “Oh, but she loves it, you know! It’s her hobby. Why, she tried to be a mother to Zinnia Lacrosse.... Fancy a child of Judy’s age attempting to keep a movie star straight! She used to give good advice to Buondelmonte.... But that nightmare’s over now, and we’re all together again, and there’s only Terry, poor darling, to worry about. I _do_ worry about him, you know, Martin. And isn’t it sweet of him to want to be properly educated? For Cliffe, of course, education has always just been college sports and racing-motors. That’s one reason why I’ve missed so much ... but I am determined that Terry shall have all the opportunities I haven’t had. This tutor I was speaking about, Gerald Ormerod—I wonder if you’d see him for me to-morrow, Martin? It’s no use asking Cliffe—he’d just shout and brag, and spoil the whole thing. Gerald—I’ve got to calling him Gerald because Fanny Tradeschi always did—he comes of very good people, you see, and he’s almost too sensitive ... too much of an idealist.... I can’t tell you what it’s been to me, these last weeks, to see Venice through the eyes of some one who really cares for beauty.... You’ll have a talk with him about Terry, Martin dear? I’m sure Cliffe would give any salary you advise—and it would be the saving of our poor Terry to be with some one really sensitive and cultivated ... and Bun, too ... he might put some sort of reason into Bun, who’s beginning to get quite out of hand with Scopy.... And, Martin, don’t forget: you can fix the salary as high as you like.”

VII

Two days later Boyne sat taking his morning coffee with Judith Wheater at a rickety iron table in the mouldy garden of the _Pension Grimani_. He had bribed a maid to carry out their breakfast, so that they might escape the stuffiness of the low-ceilinged dining-room, full of yesterday’s dinner smells, of subdued groups of old maids and giggling bands of school-girls, and of the too-pervasive clatter of the corner table about which Scopy and Nanny had gathered their flock. It was Boyne’s last day in Venice, and he wanted a clear hour of it with Judith. Presently the family would surge up like a spring tide, every one of them—from Mr. and Mrs. Wheater, with the “Fancy Girl” lying idle off San Giorgio, and a string of unemployed motors at Fusina, to Beechy and Zinnie squabbling over their new necklaces from the Merceria, and Miss Scope with a fresh set of problems for the summer—all wanting Boyne’s advice or sympathy or consolation, or at least his passive presence at their debates. All this was rather trying, and the eager proximity of the little Wheaters made privacy impossible. Yet Boyne was more than ever glad that he had resisted the persuasions of their parents, and carried his luggage to the _Pension Grimani_ instead of to the Palace Hotel. The mere existence of Palace Hotels was an open wound to him. Not that he was indifferent to the material advantages they offered. Nobody appreciated hot baths and white tiles, electric bedlamps and prompt service, more than he whose lot was usually cast in places so remote from them. He loved Palace Hotels; but he loathed the mere thought of the people who frequented them.

Judy, he discovered, was of the same mind. Boyne had felt a little resentful of the fact that only the Wheaters’ youngest-born was to share the luxury of their hotel; it seemed rather beastly to banish the others to frowsy lodgings around the corner. At the moment he had avoided Judy’s eye, fearing to catch in it the reflection of his thought: most of Judy’s feelings were beginning to reverberate in him. But now, in the leisure of their first talk since landing, he learned that no such feeling had marred the meeting of the little Wheaters with their parents.

Blanca, Judith owned, probably had minded a little, just at first. Silly Blanca—she was always rather jealous of the fuss that Joyce and father made about Chip. Besides, she loved smartness, and picking up new ideas about clothes from the _chic_ women in hotel restaurants; and she liked to be seen about with Joyce, who was so smart herself, and to have other smart ladies say: “Is this your dear little girl? We should have known her anywhere from the likeness.”

But it was precisely because of Blanca that Judith most disliked going to “Palaces.” “Ever since she got engaged to the lift-boy at Biarritz....”

“Engaged?” Boyne gasped. “But, Judy ... but Blanca’s barely eleven....”

“Oh, I was engaged myself at Blanca’s age—to a page at a skating-rink.” Judith’s small face, as she made the admission, had the wistful air of middle-age looking back on the sweet follies of youth. “But that was different. He was a very nice little Swiss boy; and I only gave him one of my hair-ribbons, and he gave me one of his livery buttons; and when he went home for his holiday he sent me dried edelweiss, and forget-me-nots pasted on cards. But these modern children are different. Blanca’s boy wanted a ring with a real stone in it; and he was a horrid big thing with a fat nose that wriggled. Terry and I could hardly bear it. And when Scopy found out about it she made an awful row, and threatened to write to mother ... so altogether we’re better off here. In fact I wrote to father that we’d better put up at a place like this, where the children can rush about and make a noise, and nobody bothers. I think it’s rather jolly here, don’t you, Martin?”

She had called him Martin, as a matter of course, since the second day out from Algiers; and he could never hear his name in her fresh young trill without a stir of pleasure.

He said he thought the _Pension Grimani_ awfully jolly, and was glad it suited the rest of them as well as it did him. Then she asked if it was all right about Terry’s tutor, and what he thought of the young man. The answer to this was more difficult. Boyne was not sure what he thought. He had had an interview with Mr. Ormerod on the previous day; an interview somewhat halting and embarrassed on his own part, perfectly firm and self-possessed on the tutor’s. Mr. Ormerod was a good-looking young Englishman with the University stamp upon him. He had very fair hair, somewhat long and rumpled, lazy ironic gray eyes, and a discontented mouth. He looked clever, moody and uncertain; but he was cultivated and intelligent, and it seemed certain that Terry would learn more, and be more usefully occupied, in his care than in Miss Scope’s. Boyne’s embarrassment proceeded not only from the sense of his unfitness to choose a tutor for anybody, but from the absurdity of having to do so with the pupil’s parents on the spot. Mr. Ormerod, however, seemed neither surprised nor disturbed. He had seen Terry, and was sure he was an awfully good little chap; his only hesitation was as to the salary. Boyne, who had fixed it to the best of his judgment, saw at once that, though it exceeded the usual terms, it was below Mr. Ormerod’s mark. The young man explained that the Princess Tradeschi had let him down rather badly, and that it was a beastly nuisance, but he really couldn’t give in about his screw. Boyne remembered Mrs. Wheater’s parting injunction, and to get over the difficulty suggested throwing in Bun. “There’s the little Buondelmonte boy—a sort of step-son; he’s rather a handful for the governess, and perhaps you would take him on for part of the time. In that case—”

This closed the transaction to Mr. Ormerod’s advantage, and enabled Boyne to report to the Wheaters that their eldest son’s education would begin the next day. And now he had to answer Judith’s question.

“He strikes me as clever; but I don’t know how hard he’ll make Terry work.”

“Oh, Terry will make _him_ work. And as long as Joyce wants it I’m glad it’s settled. If she hadn’t, father might have kicked at the price. Not that he isn’t awfully generous to us; but he can’t see why people should want to be educated when they don’t have to. What does it ever _lead_ to, he says.” She wrinkled her young brows pensively. “I don’t know; do you? I can’t explain. But if Terry wants it I’m sure it’s right. You’ve read a lot yourself, haven’t you? I don’t suppose I shall ever care much about reading ... but what’s the use of bothering, when I should never have a minute’s time, no matter how much I cared to do it?”

He reminded her that she might have time later, and added that, now that her parents were in an educational mood, he wondered she didn’t take advantage of it to get herself sent to a good school, if only to be able to keep up with Terry. At this she smiled a little wistfully; it was the same shy doubtful smile with which she had looked about her in the cathedral at Monreale, trying to puzzle out what he saw in it. But her frown of responsibility returned. “Go to school? Me? But when, I’d like to know? There’ll always be some of the children left to look after. Why, I shall be too old for school before Chip is anywhere near Terry’s age. And besides, I never mean to leave the children—_never_!” She brought the word out with the shrill emphasis he had already heard in her voice when her flock had to be protected or reproved. “We’ve all sworn that,” she added. “We took an awful oath one day at Biskra that we’d never be separated again, no matter what happened. Even Chip had to hold up his fist and say: ‘I swear.’ We did it on Scopy’s ‘Cyclopædia of Nursery Remedies.’ And if things went wrong again, and I was off at one of your schools, who’d see to it that the oath was kept?”

“But now that all the children are safely with your own people, couldn’t you let the oath take care of itself, and think a little of what’s best for you?”

She raised her eyes with a puzzled stare which made them seem as young as Zinnie’s. “You’d like me to go to school?”

He returned the look with one of equal gravity. “Most awfully.”

Her colour rose a little. “Then I should like to.”

“Well, then—”

She shook her head and her flush faded. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever understand—you or anybody. How could I leave the children now? I’ve got to get them off to Switzerland in another fortnight; this is no place for Terry. And suppose Mr. Ormerod decides he won’t come with us—”

“Won’t come with you? But it’s precisely what he’s been engaged to do!”

She gave an impatient shrug like her mother’s, and turned on Boyne a little face sharp with interrogation. “Well, then, suppose it was mother who didn’t want him to?”

“Your mother? Why, child, it was she who found him. She knows all about him; she—”

“She jolly well likes doing Venice with him,” Judy completed his sentence with a hideous promptness. It was Boyne’s turn to redden. He averted his eyes from her with one of Miss Scope’s abrupt twists, and pushed his chair back as if to get up. Judy leant across the table and touched his sleeve timidly.

“I’ve said something you don’t like, Martin?”

“You’ve said something exceedingly silly. Something I should hate to hear if you were grown up. But at your age it’s merely silly, and doesn’t matter.”

She was on her feet in a flash, quivering with anger. “My age? My age? What do you know about my age? I’m as old as your grandmother. I’m as old as the hills. I suppose you think I oughtn’t to say things like that about mother—but what am I to do, when they’re true, and there’s no one but you that I can say them to?”

He never quite knew, when she took that tone, if he was most moved or offended by it. There were moments when she frightened him; when he would have given the world to believe either that she was five years older than she said, or else that she did not know the meaning of the words she used. At such moments it was always the vision of Rose Sellars which took possession of him, and he found himself breathlessly explaining this strange child to her, and feeling that what was so clear to him would become incomprehensible as soon as he tried to make it clear to others, and especially to Mrs. Sellars. “There’s nothing to be done about it,” he thought despairingly. Aloud he remarked, in an impatient tone: “You’re very foolish not to go to school.”

She made no reply, but simply said, with a return of her wistful look: “Perhaps if you were going to stay here you’d lend me some books.”

“But I’m not going to stay here; I’m off to-morrow morning,” he answered angrily, keeping his head turned away with an irritated sense that if he should meet her eyes he would see tears in them.

Her own anger had dropped—he knew it without looking at her, and he had the sense that she was standing near him, very small and pale. “Martin, if you’d only stay! There are so many things left undecided.... Father and mother can’t make up their minds where to go next, and it’s always when they’ve got nothing particular to do that they quarrel. They can’t get anybody to go on the yacht with them—not till Cowes. And if they have to chuck the cruise father wants to go to Paris, and mother wants to go motoring in the hill-towns of Italy (where are they, do you know?) And if they get wrangling again what in the world is to become of us children?”

He turned back then, and put his hand on her arm. There was an old bench, as shaky as the table, under a sort of ragged sounding-board of oleanders. “Sit down, my dear.” He sat beside her, smiling a little, lighting a cigarette to prove his ease and impartiality. “You’re taking all this much too hard, you know. You’ve too much on your shoulders, and you’re over-tired: that’s all. I’ve been with your father and mother for two days now, and I see no signs of anything going wrong. The only trouble with them is that they’re too rich. That makes them fretful: it’s like teething. Every time your father hears he’s made another million it’s like cutting a new tooth. They hurt to bite on when one has so many. But he’ll find people soon to go off for a cruise with him, and then he’ll have to decide about your summer. Your people must see that this place is not bracing enough for Terry; and they’ll want him to settle down somewhere in the mountains, and get to work as soon as possible.”

The tone of his voice seemed to quiet her, though he suspected that at first she was too agitated to follow what he said. “But what sort of people?” she brought out at length, disconsolately.

“What sort of people?”

“To go on the yacht. That’s another thing. When mother is away from father, and I’m with her, it’s easier in some ways—except that then I fret about the other children. When Joyce and father are together they do all sorts of crazy things, just to be in opposition to each other. Take up with horrid people, I mean, people who drink and have rows. And then they get squabbling again, as they did when Buondelmonte sent father the bill for his Rolls-Royce....”

“Buondelmonte?”

“Yes; but Joyce said we were never to talk about that—she forbade us all.”

“She was quite right.”

“Yes; only it’s true. And they do get into all sorts of rows and muddles about the people they pick up—”

At this moment Boyne, hearing a shuffle on the gravel, looked around and saw the maid approaching with a card. The maid glanced doubtfully at the two, and finally handed the card to Boyne, as the person most likely to represent law and order in the effervescent party to which he seemed to belong. It was a very large and stiff piece of paste-board, bearing the name: _Marchioness of Wrench_, and underneath, in a sprawling untaught hand: “To see my daughter Zinnie Wheater,” the “my” being scratched out and “her” substituted for it. Boyne, after staring at this document perplexedly, passed it on to Judith, who sprang up with an astonished exclamation.

“Why, it must be Zinnia Lacrosse! Why, she’s married again! It’s true, then, what Blanca saw in the papers....” She looked inquiringly at Boyne. “Do you suppose she’s really here?”

“Of course I’m here!” cried a sharp gay voice from the doorway; and through the unkempt shrubbery an apparition sparkling with youth and paint and jewels swept toward them on a wave of perfume.

“Hullo, Judy—why, it’s _you_!” But the newcomer was not looking at Judith. She stood still and scrutinised Boyne with great eyes set like jewels in a raying-out of enamelled lashes. She had a perfectly oval face, a small exquisitely curved mouth, and an air of innocent corruption which gave Boyne a slightly squeamish feeling as she turned and flung her arms about Judy.

“Well, old Judy, I’m glad to see you again.... Who’s your friend?” she added, darting a glance at Boyne through slanting lids. All her gestures had something smooth and automatic, and a little larger than life.

“He’s Mr. Boyne. He’s father’s friend too. This is Zinnia Lacrosse, Martin.”

“No, it isn’t, either! It’s the Marchioness of Wrench. Only I’m just called Lady Wrench, except on visiting-cards, and when they put me in the newspapers, or I talk to the servants. And of course you’ll call me Zinnia just the same, Judy. How d’ye do, Mr. Boyne?” murmured the star, with an accession of elegance and a languidly extended hand. But she had already mustered Boyne, and was looking over his shoulder as she addressed him. “What I’m after is Zinnie, you know,” she smiled. “Wrenny’s waiting in the gondola—Wrenny’s my husband—and I’ve promised to take her out and show her to him.”