Chapter XX: “wherefore Art Thou Romeo?”

At the Molo we parted. The Donisthorpes, Romeo said, must long have been expecting him, fidgeting that he did not arrive; he knew not what lame excuse he could rake up to satisfy them. It was agreed on both sides, however, and impressed with last words, that he must not break poor Meta’s heart prematurely, by too abrupt an avowal of his new decision. We were to break it by degrees—to give her three days of purgatory. Meanwhile, Romeo promised he would not see me again, at least to speak together; though he asked leave, wistfully, to pass under my window once each morning and smile at me, just so as to make sure of my presence. I wanted this interval; I wished to see whether he would remain firm to his purpose when he was removed for a day or two from that “magnetism” of my eyes on which he dwelt so strongly.

I spent the three days of grace in wandering about Venice. For the most part, I avoided the great square, St. Mark’s, the Academy—all the familiar tourist haunts—because I did not desire collision with the Donisthorpes. Most of my time I devoted to the out-of-the-way streets and the out-of-the-way sights, which are so infinitely amusing; the funny little alleys where the true Venetians stroll; the funny little _campi_, where old men and children lie stretched in the shade on the north side of some small church, as fallow-deer huddle on the north side of the domed oaks in a park at noontide. Every turn revealed some passing picture. As I had said to Romeo, it was all Venice. Not a remote sunless lane, with walls of peeling plaster, tufted with pellitory, that is not dear to my heart; not a sluggish side canal, into whose stagnant green water branches of acacia and trailing sprays of Virginia creeper hang from beyond the mouldering garden grill, but I love and cherish it. Little Romanesque windows, high up on some red-washed steeple, with twin round arches, tall and narrow, held apart in the midst by one twisted column; great patches of sunlight falling through quatrefoils in dazzling relief on the deep recessed gloom of the loggia; wee bridges that rise, arched like a cat’s back, over streams strewn with cabbage-leaves, where market boats from Mestre, laden high with pumpkins, crawl slowly down the channel—do I not know them all? Are they not etched on my brain by some fadeless process of mental photography?

In spite of my haunting these remoter by-ways, however, I did once by accident catch sight of the Donisthorpes. They were seated with the prebendary at a _café_ in the great Piazza, as I crossed it one afternoon on my way home from San Zaccaria, where I had been feasting on saints in the placid enjoyment of every form of martyrdom. Sir Everard, leaning back on his chair and sipping black coffee, with a small brown cap pushed well off his forehead, a brown tourist suit, and a capacious yellow waistcoat, amply displayed in front of him, looked more absurdly like a fat toad than ever. Lady Donisthorpe, smiling sweetly upon Venice in general, with her lady-like softness, her mechanical amiability, her pouter-pigeon suavity, yet showed marks about the eyes of some inner dissatisfaction. They did not observe me; I stole close behind them, anxious to see the immaculate colourless Meta; I wished to know for myself what manner of girl she might be; but she was not with them—gone off, no doubt, for a stroll round the square with Romeo. That thought drove me quickly home; like a frightened rabbit, I rushed under the clock-tower and along the thronged Merceria to my hotel on a side canal; I could not have endured to see them together like lovers.

Had I no qualms meanwhile? Aye, marry, had I? Do you think I slept much through those three long nights of suspense and torture? If I tramped from church to church and picture to picture during the day, ’twas but to escape from my own stinging thoughts for a moment. I argued it all out over and over again with myself. When we two had been seated side by side in the gondola—Romeo’s arm half stealing round my waist, my head half pillowed one second on Romeo’s shoulder—the question of ethics had been translucent as crystal. We saw quite clearly our course was mapped out for us by eternal equities. Even in Meta’s interest, I was advising him for the best. “The whole man,” I had said—“body, soul, and spirit—or else nothing!” That was woman’s full gospel of the new dispensation. Less than that could be no true marriage. And “is it not better, under such conditions, to change one’s mind early than to change it too late? Is it not better for you to speak the truth, even at great risk of pain and humiliation to a woman you have loved, than to tie her for life to a man who cannot give her his whole heart unreservedly, enthusiastically? Is it not better for her to be made miserable once than to be made miserable for ever?” In advising Romeo to break off this one-sided engagement, was I not advising him most of all in Meta Donisthorpe’s interest?

At times I even felt as if I had succeeded in doing a great favour, unasked, to Meta.

But in the dead hour of night, when all Venice slept, and the last “Stalì!” had answered the last “Premè!” under my bedroom window, one stanza of “In Memoriam” kept ever recurring most inopportunely to my mind; I heard it in the creaking of the vane on the Dogana, in the lap of the water against the honeycombed walls, in the sigh of the wind through the arches of the belfry. It was a reproachful sound—the voice of that conscience which I flattered myself the generation of whom I am one had analysed away for ever.

“Hold thou the good; define it well;
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell.”

The Lords of Hell! The Lords of Hell! It clanged with the hour from the great Campanile! Was that where my sophisms were taking me, I wondered? The Lords of Hell! The Lords of Hell! Had I advised Romeo aright, as the woman who loves a man should strive to advise him at dangerous passes?

On the third day of the three I rose early from my sleepless bed—tired of tossing off the quilt—and wandered out by myself eastward through the tortuous labyrinth of elbow-bending streets that spreads between St. Mark’s and St. George of the Slavonians. I was bound no whither in particular; I let each narrow flagged alley, each canal-side causeway, lead me onward where it would; but, without design on my part, I found myself at last on the small paved platform with the slimy green steps that catches the morning sun, in front of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. “San Giorgio!” I thought to myself; “I must stray in here for awhile for rest and meditation. After Nicholas of Myra, has not the ever-blessed George been most of all my patron? Let me lay before him my doubts—a poor maiden’s doubts; it may be that the courteous young saint will resolve them.”

I pushed aside the padded curtain, and sat down on one of the seats. Venetian women were there with their babies, praying—dark-haired, dusky-eyed, poorly-clad, eager-spirited. For a while my eyes strayed to those ever-exquisite Carpaccios, high ranged on the left-hand wall, which tell the pretty tale of the tutelary saint with naïve Venetian idealistic realism. I scarce knew which of the two chief actors I admired the more—in the episode of the slaying of the dragon, so familiar to me from my own life, the beautiful, graceful youth, with his loose golden hair rippling free on the wind; or, in the scene of the baptism, the kneeling Princess Cleodolind, her long, fair tresses flowing richly down her back as she bends to receive the sacrament of the font at the hands of her chivalrous and devout deliverer. St. George, I fancied, in his earnest, clear face, somehow recalled my Romeo; but the Princess—I shuddered: what ill-omen was this? The Princess whom he baptised was a fair-haired maiden. I knew Meta was fair—had he not spoken of her “masses of yellow tow”? A cold thrill ran down my spine. Oh, St. Nicholas—oh, St. George, avert the omen!

I pulled out my little silver crucifix, and, clasping it tight, decided to lay my case before the Madonna herself, who reigns in the altar-piece. Am I a Catholic, then? you ask. That is alien to this story. There are three subjects which I decline to discuss: bimetallism, the sex question, and my religious convictions.

As I bent my knee before Our Lady on the shrine a low sob by my side distracted my attention. It came from a young girl a little apart in the gloom. Her face lay hidden in her hands—small gloved hands, like a lady’s; but her fine-fibred hair was golden and luxuriantly abundant. I glanced from her to the Carpaccio, and from the Carpaccio to her. Yes, it could not be gainsaid—this was the Princess Cleodolind.

Had her St. George proved untrue? She was crying bitterly.

I knew at once that was the right explanation. The sound of her sobs betrayed it. For there are species in crying. There is the cry of the mother for the loss of her son; there is the cry of the wife for the faithlessness of her husband; there is the cry of the maiden for the defection of her lover. Each has its own note, recognisable at the first sound to those who have once heard it. We talk in such cases of woman’s intuition; it were truer, I think, to call it inference, for inference it is from delicate observation. All women observe keenly the symptoms of emotion; at moments of exaltation or passion they observe them with an almost miraculous acuteness. I knew in a second that Cleodolind had lost her lover’s heart; and I guessed in a flash that Cleodolind was Meta.

She was dressed like a lady; and out at this early hour; when she and I, alone of our class, driven from our beds by alternative aspects of the self-same problem, were abroad among the fisherwomen.

I gazed at her with the respect one always accords to sorrow. My heart misgave me. How easy it was in the gondola to philosophise in the abstract; but here, on dry land, and in sight of this poor child with the breaking heart—philosophy in the concrete seemed to present its own fresh difficulties.

Of a sudden she raised her face, and glanced across at me, piteously. Her eyes met mine. I started. The wisp of a figure, the pathetic blue eyes, the sunny fluff of hair: it was Michaela.

I took it in with a great gulp. Michaela was Meta, then, and Meta Michaela.

I could not understand it, for the inscription on her card said, not Donisthorpe, but “Miss Allardyce”; and had she not told me that her Christian name was Margaret? But I had no time to think it out just then. With a little cry of pleasure, she came over to me, still weeping.

“You dear thing!” she whispered, holding out her gloved hand, “what a comfort to see you! I want to have a talk with you. You were so good to me at Holmwood.”

I saw it was inevitable. I must face Meta now. I took her hand in mine, with a deep sense of repentant treachery. “Come out with me, dear,” I said, for she melted my heart. “Tell me all your trouble.”

She pressed my hand in return. “I knew you would be good to me,” she answered. “You are odd, but oh, so good. I saw it in your big eyes the first day I met you. Do you know, your eyes are magnetic; they seem to draw one.”

“So I have been told,” I answered bitterly.

“Where can we go to talk?” she asked. She had a caressing voice. “I am sure you will do me good. And I do so want to talk this over with somebody else besides mamma. Mamma is like a feather-bed. She is kind in her way, but so soft and comfortable. Nothing seems to make a dint in her.”

Inventiveness forsook me. I had no suggestion to offer except another gondola. And even at that moment, when the world whirled round madly with myself for pivot, I was dimly conscious, as one is often conscious of such trifles at a great crisis, that always in Venice, when people wanted a _tête-à-tête_, they must have taken a gondola. Nowhere else in that tangle of narrow streets and small squares could one go unobserved for a second.

We called a gondolier. “Where shall we tell him to take us?” Michaela asked. It was not in her nature to suggest a route spontaneously.

“Out on the open,” I replied. “We shall be less overlooked there.” Then I added a little morosely, “If you are not afraid I shall drown you.”

She smiled through her tears. “You were always so queer,” she said, “but so kind.” She did not guess how much more reason I had now for drowning her. She jumped lightly into the boat; she was a light little atomy; you could have blown her away with a good puff, like thistledown.

The gondolier took us across by San Giorgio Maggiore. Michaela sat by my side, holding my hand in hers. If ever in my life, I felt guilty that minute.

So all those months I had been doing in earnest what I had said in jest—unconsciously playing Carmen to her Michaela. I had stolen away her Don José—and had never known it!

She told me hurriedly how the man to whom she was engaged had always seemed to love her, oh, so much—till five months ago; how, since that time, his love had been gradually fading; how it had faded all away, till she was wretched, hopeless!

She cried so intensely that I laid her head on my shoulder. ’Twas a soft little head. I felt like a man to her as I tried to comfort her.

“Five years,” she sobbed out: “five years—all forgotten!”

“You must have been a child at the time when you began to love him,” I murmured.

She raised her head. “Yes, a child. That’s what makes it so much worse! We have loved and been loved since we were both children. Every thought, every pleasure, we have shared with one another. I was cycling with him that day when I first met you. We have grown up together. He has grown into my heart—ever closer and closer.”

“What is his name?” I asked, trembling.

She told me. I hardly needed to ask it.

“Why, I know him a little,” I said. “But I thought—he was engaged to a daughter of Lady Donisthorpe’s.”

“Yes, of course. Lady Donisthorpe is my mother.”

“But—her name is Meta; and you are Margaret Allardyce?”

“Mamma married again; I told you I had a stepfather.”

She went on with her story. She loved him more and more. Her heart was bound up with him. After so long a time, too! If he had told her three years ago—— But five years—you could never make five years seem nothing.

“And can you account for it?” I inquired, to see how much she knew, stroking her sunny hair with my hand as I did so.

“You _dear_ thing! How sweetly sympathetic you are! Oh, yes, but it is almost too dreadful to tell. A hateful woman—a type-writer girl at his office! Could you ever have believed a person like _that_ would come between us?”

“Perhaps,” I ventured to suggest, “she did not mean it.”

“Did not mean it? Oh, she did: the dreadful creature, she has bewitched him! He loves _her_ best now. And yet, you would think that the years must count; the years must count!” She sobbed, and became inaudible.

“Has he told you of her?” I faltered.

“Oh! no; he says nothing. He only lets me feel it. But mamma met her once at a dinner Toto gave at the Savoy—a hateful vulgar creature! Mamma and his mother both spoke to him of the way he treated her—the attention he paid her—bringing a woman like that to dine with ladies, it was unpardonable.”

“Some type-writers _are_ ladies, Michaela,” I put in softly. “I am a type-writer myself.”

“Ah! yes, but that is different! you are so sweet, so gentle. You know so much; you have been brought up like a lady; you have sympathy and magnetism. This other creature—mother said it was horrid to be in the same room with her. So loud, so noisy! And she’s here now, she’s here; she has followed him to Venice on purpose to thwart us. He came out to stay with me till the day we were to be married. And this woman, when she saw her hold on him was failing, rushed after him to prevent it. Can you believe such wickedness? Mamma saw her with him in a gondola. Oh! I can’t bear to say it, dear, in a gondola, near the Riva, with his arm around her!”

“Perhaps,” I hazarded, “when she came here she did not know he was engaged. Perhaps, if we could speak to her we might play upon some chord in her better nature.”

Michaela looked up at me admiringly. “You beautiful, broad-minded person,” she cried; “how good you are, how tolerant! You make allowances and excuses for everyone, I declare! How I wish I was like you! But she _has_ no better nature, I believe. Mamma says she is a person lost to all sense of shame. Why, the stories she told at that dinner of Toto’s about the places she had been in and the people she had met were quite beyond, you know, quite beyond; oh, too dreadful for anything.”

I risked another card. “My dear little friend,” I said, “I speak of the thing that I know: she _has_ a better nature.” (Oh, God, how it was battling now against love of Romeo in her heart; how it was grappling and struggling!) “I am almost sure I have met this girl of whom you speak. There is a type-writer stopping at the same hotel as myself, and I think she was out in a gondola the other day with your Romeo—let us call him Romeo; it is ‘more real and agreeable,’ as Dick Swiveller said to the Marchioness, and ’tis the only way in which I can talk about people.” I maundered on, to gain time, for though outwardly I was jesting, within I was fighting wild beasts at Ephesus. “Now, she has talked to me of your Romeo, and I assure you solemnly, when she arrived in Venice she had not an idea he was engaged—of that I am confident.”

“Ah, but she knows it now, I am sure; and yet, she bewitches him!”

I played one card still, a more doubtful and dangerous card than any. “Perhaps,” I answered. “But the years must count. You are right in that. Remember, as you say, I am (I hope) broad-minded. I try to see things from everybody’s point of view. From yours, I see now that Romeo is behaving—cruelly. From the type-writer girl’s, I see that she loves him deeply, very deeply; but ’tis a new love, fresh grown; however firmly it may have rooted itself, it has no claim on the score of age as against yours; and if she is told so calmly and frankly, she may perhaps realise it. From Romeo’s, I see—well, more than I like to tell you.” I paused and hesitated. The effort to gain time made me didactic. “Life is the interaction of individualities,” I said, “each seeing things its own way. Justice is the attempt to reconcile them. Let us try here if we can make this type-writer girl see something a little beyond her own point of view—see, as you say, that the years must count. She is not wholly bad, whatever Lady Donisthorpe may tell you. I will be your ambassador. I will speak to _her_; I will speak to Romeo. I will try to make them feel what you have made me feel—that the years should count. And I will come to San Giorgio of the Slavonians to tell you what success I have had in my embassy at this time to-morrow.”

She brightened up at the idea. She thanked me profusely. “He loves me still,” she said, “a little; only, this girl bewitches him. Oh, I have read about her eyes and her hair in his verses. He thought no one knew; he put it so darkly—all wrapped up in words; but I could see they were hers, though he thinks me so silly. I am clever enough where one’s heart is concerned; I can catch at a straw then. But if _she_ were once away, I am sure he would come back to me.” She nestled into my shoulder. “You _dear_ thing!” she cried again, grinding her teeth with affection, “you have put fresh hope in me.”

“Thank you, dear,” I answered. “Do you remember at Holmwood I called you Michaela, because you were so fair, like the girl in the opera? Now, this type-writer girl is dark, and she has been playing Carmen to you—stealing your love away from you by her clever ways and her blandishments. She has gypsy attractiveness. But, Michaela, I am sure she did not mean it. If she had known of you, if she might have seen you, she could not have wronged you. Do you recollect what I said to you in the train that day—‘You dear little thing, no one could ever hurt you!’? Well, I am sure the type-writer woman would feel as I do—if she knew you. But I want to make you promise me one thing—if I bring you back your Romeo, you will forgive her?—you will never again call her a horrid creature?”

She soothed my hand in turn. “I could promise you anything,” she said. “I never knew anyone so tender and helpful.”

We bid the gondolier turn. She held my hand still; blue sky in her eyes shone after the rain. “Only to think,” she cried, “I have met you three times—no more; and yet I feel you are a dear friend—the sort of friend who would do anything for one.”

“You have reason,” I answered.

We returned to the Molo. A crushed heart and a doubtful one had embarked in that gondola; a crushed heart and a doubtful one disembarked from it again. But they had changed places.

Three days ago I had seen through the gates of Paradise. To-day an angel with a flaming sword stood to bar my entrance. And, worst of all, I knew his name was Justice.