Chapter XIX: “o, Romeo, Romeo!”

When Linnæus first saw gorse in blossom he fell on his knees and thanked God. Our modern Pharisees, who say grace before meat, never, I fancy, say grace before Venice.

And yet there is only one Venice.

From the moment you arrive in the dusk at the station, and stroll down slippery steps to your gondola, to glide with stealthy movement along the lesser canals, under mysterious bridges where mysterious bystanders lean over to watch you, unknown forms that creep from dark doors in unknown streets—do you not thank God, like Linnæus, that he has brought you to Venice? And does not this feeling of gratitude and wonder for that living romance deepen on you each day that you remain? Do you not long to float for ever down those noiseless ways, to gaze up for ever at those water-stained palaces, to dream for all time among those innocent-faced St. Ursulas? Mint, anise, and cumin, indeed, when God has given us Venice! The country or the south! I pine in London.

I had loitered on my way out, breaking my nights at Lucerne and Milan, that Romeo might have time to reach his journey’s end with certainty before my arrival. And on my first morning of freedom by the motionless lagoons, I set out early to renew my acquaintance with Venice.

I did not know where Romeo was stopping; nor did I seek to find out. I left everything to St. Nicholas. If chance should throw me in my Romeo’s way, well and good; if chance chose to be unkind, better so than that I should track him. Besides, in Venice, you cannot long fail to meet whoever else is there. All the world gravitates towards the centre of the Piazza. Sooner or later, you must needs cross the path of everyone in the city.

I set out from my hotel on foot; I love footing it in Venice; I love the intricate tangle of narrow paved alleys, overhung by stone sills and rusty iron balconies, by which the walker threads his way through the mazes of the city. Millionaires in gondolas never know it. You must ramble to see Venice. Past little dim shops where red water-melons, sliced open, and strings of yellow carrots adorn the slabs; past odours of salt fish and rank whiffs of garlic; past cavernous recesses where, from murky Tintoretto-like gloom, the light of a little lamp just serves to throw up the tinsel crown of Our Lady. So suddenly at once, under the columns of a portico, into the open sky of the great square, the thronging turmoil of pigeons, the liberal flood of southern sunshine, the strong shadow of the campanile flung like a fallen obelisk on the floor of the Piazza, the mighty flagstaffs of the dead republic, and beyond them all, low and squat, a riot of white domes, the fantastic, many-pinnacled carven front of St. Mark’s, glowing golden in the pellucid air of morning.

I stood still and drew a deep breath. It was even as I thought. Grace before St. Mark’s: “For what we are about to receive——” There is but one Venice.

Holding my breath all the while, I drew near the great porches, with their round-arched tops, and gazed up at the mosaics. My soul steeped herself in beauty. I revelled in an orgy of jasper and porphyry. How gross to give thanks for beef and pudding, but none for Carpaccio, Bellini, Titian!

Slowly, out of the great dream of form and colour, bit by bit, as I gazed, distinct visions framed themselves—palm-leaves and lilies, robed shapes of angels, half-translucent alabaster shafts or capitals, rich foliage of acanthus, wandering lines of tracery. In the midst of it all, one little relief held my eye at last—a flat relief of quaint Romanesque workmanship, beautiful with the winning beauty of infantile art; two birds that faced one another, and pecked at a bunch of grapes—when, all at once, I was aware of a start of surprise beside me. I turned round. My heart fluttered for a second. It was Romeo.

Venice faded. Though I had come out to him, I was taken aback at his presence.

He gave a little gasp. “What, _you_ here,” he faltered out—“Miss Appleton—Juliet?”

“Yes,” I answered assuming an air of unconcern; “I thirsted for a breath of Italy again. It is nearly five years since I have been out of England.”

“But—this is fate!” he blurted out. “I—I came here—to avoid you.”

I was in a mischievous mood. “I can go away again,” I answered, looking deep into his eyes, and half curtseying. “It is not for me to interfere with my employer’s holiday.”

He cast me an imploring look. “Juliet,” he cried, “do not jest. Do not break my heart. This is no time for pleasantry. My child, my child, I have suffered.”

I saw it in his face. And yet I could not conceive what was his trouble. Could a mother count for so much? I had never known mine. “You look ill,” I said; “so different from what you looked last week in London. Can I do anything for you? I—I will really go away—at once—if you desire it.”

He restrained himself with an effort from seizing my hands, then and there, in the open Piazza. “_Go away?_” he cried. “_Go away?_ No, _that_ is not my trouble. I wish you _not_ to go away. I wish you to stay with me always. Juliet, you must have guessed it; you must have known it in London. Do not tell me you did not know. You _saw_ that I loved you!”

“I thought so, at times,” I answered in a very low voice. “But—why then did you wish to run away from me?”

He glanced about him with uneasy eyes. “Now this has come,” he burst forth, “I must fight it out boldly. I must face it like a man. Juliet, where can we go? I _must_ talk—alone—with you.”

“Let us take a gondola,” I suggested, my heart throbbing high with joy; for I felt I had triumphed now; his mother, and dear Meta, and ox-eyed Lady Donisthorpe were wholly forgotten.

“A gondola!” he echoed. “A gondola! Ah, how clever you are! Of course! I never thought of that. There we can talk uninterrupted.”

We moved towards the Molo. I hailed a gondolier. “Put up the felze,” I said, “so that we may not be overlooked.” The man raised the little black box, and shut us in as in a sedan-chair. Romeo gazed admiration again. “And you talk Italian!”

“Whither, signore?” the gondolier asked.

“Where shall we go?” Romeo inquired, turning to me.

“Where you will,” I answered; “it is all Venice.” I did not add that with him by my side all the world would be Venice.

He pointed towards the open, where we would be less observed. The gondolier nodded. Then the old fancy seized me. “To San Nicolò di Lido!” I cried. It seemed like an omen. My patron saint had always brought me luck, and his church lay before me. In this crisis of my fate I would commend myself to his favour.

I told Romeo why I chose that way. He smiled, a little sadly. “May it turn out as you wish,” he exclaimed. “May St. Nicholas help us!”

I sat by his side on the soft black cushions, never uttering a word—placidly, quietly happy. I was in no hurry to speak; the sense that I had Romeo alone to myself at last was joy enough for me. He took my hand in his. I let it lie there, unresisting.

Words only spoil such first thrills of fruition. Touch is the mother-sense of love; it needs no interpreter.

At last Romeo broke the charmed silence. I gave a little sigh as he broke it. “Oh, why so soon?” I asked. But, like a man, he was eager to speak and explain himself. They _are_ so precipitate!

“What am I to do, Juliet?” he cried, burying his face in his hands. “Your coming has thrown me back upon my first resolve; it has driven me from my stronghold. When I tore myself away from you in London and no longer saw your eyes—those great magnetic uncomplaining eyes of yours, those eyes that have bewitched me—I made up my mind that I must go through with it now, and try to forget you. Not try, but pretend; for it would be all pretence. Since the first day you came, daily and daily you have meant more and more to me. It was hard to break away from you, but I broke away and came here, so that I might be free from the spell; for while I saw your eyes I could think of nothing else; and now chance has thrown you in my path again, and—I cannot go through with it.”

“Not chance,” I murmured low; “not chance—but St. Nicholas! I have come with the money that my story brought me.”

He smiled at my little conceit, for I had told him in London of my half-fanciful cult of the poor maids’ saint, and I had called my little tale “A Ward of St. Nicholas.”

“You are a brownie!” he cried, gazing at me. “You wild thing, what brought you here?”

I laughed. “The Gotthard railway—and my love of adventure. I was sickening of England; I had a migratory instinct, like birds when they gather on the telegraph wires in autumn, or restless Spanish sheep in spring, when they herd and leap, uneasy to be driven to their pastures in the mountains.”

“What a wild thing you are!” he repeated. “A brownie, a brownie! I wonder where you got it from?”

“From my gypsy ancestry, I suppose,” I answered.

“Gypsy—but I thought you told me you were American?”

“On my father’s side, yes; but on my mother’s Lowland Scot or Anglo-Indian. She was a Baillie of the Borders; and I suspect all borderers of sharing the blood of the Faas and the Petulengros. There was plenty of intermarriage.”

“No doubt,” he mused. “The difference must have been slight between a moss-trooper and a gypsy. Each had much the same gentility. And, indeed, I remember the ‘Lord and Earl of Little Egypt’ was summoned to Edinburgh as a peer of parliament.”

“At any rate,” I said gaily, “whether ’tis true or false, it accounts, to my mind, for the Meg Merrilies vein in me. I was born a random vagrant in the world, a peripatetic philosopher. I love movement, I love freedom—Bohemia. Why, I could tell your fortune now if you cared to cross my hand with silver.”

He gazed into my eyes. “I do not doubt it,” he answered, “for it lies in your hands to-day.”

I thrilled and was still. The gondola glided over the glassy water.

Soon he began again. “Gypsy, I want your help. You must _make_ my fortune, not tell it. Show me how to act. Show me how to get free. What can I do in this crisis, Juliet—my Juliet?”

“How can I answer?” I replied. “’Tis for your own heart to say. I know you are fond of me. But—your mother has money, I suppose, and you prefer your mother.”

He withdrew the arm that lay half round me, and sat up facing me in surprise. “My mother!” he cried. “My mother! Why, Juliet, my child, what do you mean? It is not my mother I think of—not her, but poor Meta!”

A pang darted through me. “Then you love her!” I exclaimed; “that woman’s daughter!”

“Love her? I do not say that. Yet, Juliet, consider; put yourself in her place: I have been five years engaged to her!”

It burst upon me like a thunderbolt. Why had I never guessed it? From the first day we met I had taken it for granted—unreservedly, unthinkingly—that Romeo was heart-free and unfettered as I was. Even when I met Lady Donisthorpe I imagined too fast that she was flinging Meta openly at his head, but not that he was betrothed to her. My own heart must have blinded me. Now that I realised it all, I stood aghast at the way woman’s instinct had failed me. How had I managed to misunderstand? I saw in a flash that the conflict I had observed in Romeo before he left London was a conflict in his soul between love and honour.

He seized my hand again. “It is _that_ that made it so difficult,” he whispered. “From the first day _you_ came I began to love you. I fought against it hard, oh! so hard; I tried to talk little with you. Day after day I felt you sitting there, with your great gypsy eyes fixed ever steadily on your sheet of paper, and your heart going forth to me. I knew it went forth to me. I could feel it in the room. A subtle wave or thrill throbbed ever between us. I began to love you; and still I fought hard. But the more we talked together the more did I feel you were the woman God made for me, and that Meta was not. At last I had a great struggle—a great struggle with my heart, and came out of it as I thought victorious. I fled from you here, where the Donisthorpes had come, to remain with Meta till the day I married her. It was what honour demanded; I made love yield to honour.”

I withdrew my hand slowly. “Give me time to think this out. It has burst upon me so suddenly. Oh, Romeo, till this moment I never dreamt you were engaged to her.”

“Why _Romeo_?”

I smiled, though my heart was aching. I remembered that he did not know what I had always called him. Now I told him my fancy. “You have never been anything but _Romeo_ to me,” I murmured.

He seized my hand again. “Juliet, I _am_ your Romeo. I felt it from the first. We were meant for one another.”

“I know it!” I cried. “I know it! And this woman, who is not yours, has stolen you from me. You are mine by natural fitness; and she took you, _she_ took you!”

We leaned back on the seats and mused. The gondolier sang low to himself a soft Venetian love-song.

After some minutes I began again. “Of course,” I murmured, “it is Lady Donisthorpe’s daughter.”

“Of course. Five years ago I proposed to her.”

“Then _why_ did you not marry?” I cried vehemently. “I _hate_ these long engagements! They are vile for everybody!”

“Her stepfather would not permit it till she came of age. She is a ward in Chancery, and he has influence with the court. Till her marriage her mother has some interest in the property, and Sir Everard, to preserve it, being fabulously rich already, made an excuse that a publisher was hardly the person to whom she might expect to aspire—though he permitted, or rather encouraged the engagement.”

“And she is not yet of age?”

“In October.”

I gave an impatient wave of the hand. “But she was a child when you proposed to her!”

“A child? We were both children. We did not know our own minds. The Nemesis of it is that I know mine now, while she remains still at the childish standpoint.”

“She loves you?”

“In her baby way—yes; else it were all easy. But it would break her poor heart. Such a trusting little creature!”

“And _you_ love _her_?”

“Juliet, I thought I did once. But then, I had not learnt what love meant. She was only my Rosaline. I did not know the world of difference between a sweet little wax doll, with masses of light yellow tow for hair, and a woman, a thinking woman, with heart, soul, brain, courage—a woman who could face life full of intrepid self-reliance; a woman with nerve, audacity, spirit; a woman with Homeric love of danger and adventure; a woman made dearer by her sense of humour, the merry twinkle of her eye, her gay laugh at misfortune. I feel now that I need a comrade and a helpmeet for me. Someone who could brace me up for the battle of life; someone with great thoughts, fine fibre, noble impulses. I cannot go back to Meta. I could have done it last night. This morning, with you by my side, I feel it, I know it, impossible.”

He drew a long breath. I lay back on the cushion. “Romeo,” I said, pleading my rival’s cause, “you _must_ go back to her.”

“Never!” he answered, “never!”

I temporised. “This is not a question to decide all at once. Let us think it over slowly; let us lay it—before St. Nicholas!”

“If I lay it before St. Nicholas,” he cried, “with you beside me, the oracle can give but one answer, I warrant. For I want you; I need you; my whole being cries out for you.”

We paused again. The water was cat’s-eye green. The inexorable gondola glided on towards the Lido.

We talked it over clause by clause. A light began to break upon me. The nearer I drew to San Nicolò the clearer grew the light. Ought a man to wreck two lives—his own and the girl’s whom he means to marry (for my private fate I ignored)—in order to satisfy a false sense of honour? What, after all, was this honour? A bugbear dressed up to frighten us from the truth. And what was the truth? That Romeo was rushing madly into marriage with a girl for whom he was not fit, and who was not fit for him.

“Romeo,” I said at last, “could you make her happy?”

“That’s the rub,” he answered. “It could hardly be for long. I could give her my hand, but not my heart; for my heart, my heart, Juliet, is yours—yours only.”

“Then for _her_ sake set her free,” I cried. “The whole man—body, soul, and spirit—or nothing.”

“So I think,” he murmured. “The question is, when one has made a mistake, a mistake that involves final ruin for two lives, which is the better, after all: to repair it beforehand, while repair is still possible, or bow to an antiquated ideal of honour, an ideal that comes to us from an age when women were toys, all alike, and run one’s head into a noose from which there will be no escaping? For her sake, as well as my own and yours, ought I not to tell her, frankly but gently, that this marriage she desires must mean misery for both of us?”

I tried to be impartial, though impartiality is hard when your own love and life lie trembling in the balance. “You ought,” I answered, “if you feel sure you cannot truly love her.”

“Juliet, I can never love anyone but you. I know you for my counterpart. My love did not come suddenly; it grew up by degrees from living so near you; and it has grown, grown, grown, like a vast growth in my heart, till it has absorbed my nature. I have watched you every day, talked with you, listened to you. You know me and you understand me. But Meta, dear little soul, she seems to me like a child. I cannot share life with her. I can only take care of her. You have originality, initiative; Meta’s soul has the shape that her mother has put upon it. Look how you loved and appreciated my verses! Your criticism, your help, were of infinite use to me. In each word that you altered I felt you were right. Your suggestion of ‘harmonious’ in that last line where I had written ‘consistent’ made a full close for the sonnet, in sonorous organ music, and turned my prose into poetry. Whereas, when I gave Meta my book she read it through, and then kissed me. ‘How clever of you, you dear boy, to be able to write verses!’ Would _such_ a help be meet for me?”

I clung to his hand; it was hard to decide; but in a very low voice I faltered out, “I think not, Romeo.”

He talked of my poor attempts at writing stories; he praised them, as he had always done. “You will be famous yet, my child; and I shall be proud, whatever comes, that I was the first to encourage you.” He appreciated me, I appreciated him; surely, if marriages are made in heaven, we two were moulded for one another. Not alike, but complementary. And then, how rash to dream of marrying one woman when, even before marriage, you love another better! Is _that_ the way to insure a happy home? Is that the safe path to a life of wedded confidence?

We drew near to San Nicolò at last. “Let us go in,” I said seriously, “and submit ourselves to the saint. His body lies within. We will kneel together before it.”

“But I thought you told me St. Nicholas lay throned in a gorgeous shrine at Bari?” he objected.

“Why, of course,” I answered. “What is the use of being a saint if you cannot have two bodies, and be in two places at once? And what is the use of faith if it does not enable you to believe the impossible?”

“I _do_ believe it,” he answered; “since I came to Venice to be out of your enchantment, and found you here, more deliciously enchanting than ever. The fascination of your eyes——”

I cut him short with a gesture; but I was glad he praised them.

We landed by the steps, and entered the sailors’ church. I led Romeo up to a scalloped niche by the tribune, where I had often prayed as a girl with my father. We knelt down, side by side, before the jewelled shrine that contains the blessed dust of St. Nicholas of Myra, I hope not irreverently. I may be what the Warden at our Guild was fond of calling me, “an amiable heathen,” but at least I am sincere. Tears stole down my cheek. I asked with an earnest heart for light, for guidance. We know not, indeed, whose saintly bones repose at peace within that sculptured marble altar-tomb; nor does it matter to me much whether they be or be not those of the benign bishop of Myra. I accepted them as the symbol of that Power, above ourselves, to which our hearts go forth at moments of doubt, of fear, of anguish; and to such a Power I prayed unfeignedly, that at this turning-point of my life I might be led aright, might form the just judgment, unbiassed by self-profit, holding an equal scale between myself and my rival.

As I knelt there a single flashing ray of light beat down through a little window above upon San Nicolò’s altar-slab. It gilt the niche for a moment; it fell in gold on the tessellated floor; then it passed away as a cloud covered the sun. Rightly or wrongly, I accepted the omen. Tears stood in my eyes still, but they were tears of gladness. “St. Nicholas has answered,” I whispered. “What did he say to you, Romeo?”

Romeo looked me in the face solemnly as he made reply. “He said, ‘Better tell her early than tell her too late. Save her while she can be saved, and let three hearts be lightened.’”

Venice hung like a haze. The row back to the Molo was a lane in Paradise.