Chapter VII

Two weeks passed, and brought the month of May. On the many island banks long sprays of dog-rose and honeysuckle hung down over the water, and the narrow canals which ran through them were tunnels of blossom and verdure; on the sunny shallows thousands of white-winged gulls were fishing and bathing all the day long; and in the churches azaleas and lilies and arums were grouped round the altars under the dark-winged angels of Tintoretto and the golden-haired cherubim of Tiepolo.

The nights were still cold but the days were warm, were at noontide even hot; and Veronica Zaranegra passed almost all her time on the water. There was a little orchard island which belonged to the family, out beyond Mazzorbo; in the previous century a small summer-house or pavilion, with a red-tiled dome like a beehive, had been erected on it and was still there; a pretty toy still, though its frescoed walls were faded and its marble landing steps eaten away by the incessant washing of the sea; it was embowered in peach and plum and pear trees, and looked westward. Here she came often for breakfast, or for afternoon tea, or the evening merenda of fruit sweetmeats and wine, and here she was often accompanied by a gay party of Venetians of her own years and by the two strangers who had given her back her opals. The weather was rainless and radiant; the gondolas glided like swallows over the lagoons; she was rich, childlike, fond of pleasure; she tried to bring back the life of the eighteenth century, and amused herself with reviving its customs, its costumes, its comedies, as they had been before the storms of revolution and the smoke of war had rolled over the Alps, and Arcole and Marengo had silenced the laughter of Italy.

“I wish I had lived when this collar was new,” she said, when her jewellers returned to her the opals restored to their pristine brilliancy. “Life in Venice was one long festa then; I have read of it. It was all masque, and serenade, and courtship, and magnificence. People were not philosophical about life then; they lived. Nina Zaranegra was a beautiful woman. They have her portrait in the Belle Arte. She holds a rose to her lips and laughs. She was killed by her husband for an amour. She had these opals on her throat when he drove the stiletto through it. At least so Carlo used to tell me. But perhaps it was not true.”

“Do not wear them,” said Adrianis, to whom she was speaking. “Do not wear them if they are blood-stained. You know they are stones of sorrow.”

She laughed.

“You Sicilians are superstitious. We northerners are not. I like to wear them for that very reason of their tragedy.”

She took up the necklace and clasped it round her throat; some tendrils of her hair caught in the clasp; she gave an involuntary little cry of pain. Adrianis hastened to release her hair from the clasp. His hand trembled; their eyes met, and said much to each other. Damer, who was near, drew nearer.

“I have seen the portrait in the Belle Arte,” he said. “The Countess Nina symbolises silence with her rose, but she has the face of a woman who would not keep even her own secrets. Indeed a charming woman is always ‘_bavarde comme les pies_,’ as the French say.”

“You despise women,” said Veronica Zaranegra, with vexation.

“Oh, no. But I should not give them my confidence any more than I should give a delicate scientific instrument to a child.”

“Not even to a woman whom you loved?”

“Still less to a woman whom I loved.”

“You are a mysterious sage,” she said, a little impatiently. “You regard us as if we were children indeed, incapable of any comprehension.”

Damer did not dispute the accusation.

“Did I hear you say,” he asked, “that the lovely original of that portrait was murdered by her husband?”

“Yes, and he would not even allow her Christian burial, but had her body carried out on to the Orfano canal, and thrown into the water, with a great stone tied to her feet.”

“He was primitive,” said Damer. “Those are rough, rude ways of vengeance.”

“What would you have done?”

“I hardly know; but I should not have so stupidly wasted such a beautiful organism. Besides the end was too swift to be any great punishment.”

She was silent, looking at him with that mixture of curiosity, interest, and vague apprehension which he always aroused in her. She was not very intelligent, but she had quick susceptibilities; there was that in him which alarmed them and yet fascinated them.

“He awes me,” she said later in the day to Adrianis. “So often one cannot follow his meaning, but one always feels his reserve of power.”

It was a grave speech for a light-hearted lover of pleasure. Adrianis heard it with vexation, but he was loyal to the man who, as he considered, had saved his life.

“He is a person of great intellect,” he answered; “we are pigmies beside him. But——”

“But what?”

“He used his brains to cure my body. So I must not dispute the virtue of his use of them. Yet sometimes I fancy that he has no heart. I think all the forces in him have only nourished his mind, which is immense. But his heart, perhaps, has withered away, getting no nourishment. He would say I talk nonsense; but I think you will understand what I mean.”

“I think I understand,” said Veronica, thoughtfully.

She had thought very little in her careless young life; she had begun to think more since these two men had come into it.

“Adrianis merits better treatment than you give him,” said her duenna to her that day. “How long will you keep him in suspense? You ought to remember ‘what hell it is in waiting to abide.’”

“A hell?” said Veronica, with the colour in her face. “You mean a paradise!”

“A fool’s paradise, I fear,” replied the elder woman. “And what does that other man do here? He told me he was due at some university in Germany.”

“How can I tell why either of them stays?” said Veronica, disingenuously as her conscience told her. “Venice allures many people, especially in her spring season.”

“So does a woman in her spring,” said the elder lady, drily, with an impatient gesture.

“You are angry with me,” said Veronica, mournfully.

“No, my dear. It is as useless to be angry with you as to be angry with a young cat because in its gambols it breaks a vase of which it knows nothing of the preciousness.”

Veronica Zaranegra did not resent or reply. She knew the vase was precious; she did not mean to break it; but she wanted to be free awhile longer. Mutual love was sweet, but it was not freedom. And what she felt ashamed of was a certain reluctance which moved her to allow Damer to see or know that she loved a man of so little intellectual force as Adrianis, a man who had nothing but his physical beauty and his gay, glad temper and kind heart.

“Do you want nothing more than these?” the gaze of Damer seemed in her imagination to say to her.

She was angered with herself for thinking of him or of his opinion; he was not of her world or of her station; he was a professional man, a worker, a teacher; natural pride of lineage and habit made her regard him as in no way privileged to be considered by her. And yet she could not help being influenced by that disdain of the mental powers of others which he had never uttered, but which he continually showed. Indecision is the greatest bane of women; obstinacy costs them much, but indecision costs them more. The will of Veronica flickered like a candle in the wind, veered hither and thither like a fallen leaf in a gust of wind and rain.

Adrianis was delightful to her; his beauty, his gaiety, and his homage were all sympathetic to her. She knew that he loved her, but she prevented him telling her so; she liked her lately acquired liberty; she did not want a declaration which would force her to decide in one way or another what to do with her future. And she was affected without being aware of it by the scarcely disguised contempt which his companion had for him. It was seldom outspoken, but it was visible in every word of Damer, in every glance.

“He is beautiful, yes,” he said once to her. “So is an animal.”

“Do you not like animals?”

“I do not like or dislike them. The geologist does not like or dislike the stones he breaks up, the metallurgist does not like or dislike the ore he fuses.”

She did not venture to ask him what he meant; she had a vague conception of his meaning, and it gave her a chill as such replies gave to Adrianis: a chill such as the north wind, when it comes down from the first snows on the Dolomite peaks, gives to the honeysuckle flowers hanging over the sea-walls. She was not clever or much educated, but she had seen a good deal of the world, and she had heard men talk of science, of its pretensions and its methods, its self-worship and its tyrannies. She had put her rosy fingers in her ears and run away when they had so spoken, but some things she had heard and now remembered.

“You are what they call a physiologist?” she said once, suddenly.

“I am,” replied Damer.

She looked at him under her long silky lashes as a child looks at what it fears in the dusk of a fading day. He attracted her and repelled her, as when she had herself been a little child she had been at once charmed and frightened by the great ghostly figures on the tapestries, and the white and grey busts of gods and sages on the grand staircase of her father’s house in the Trentino. She would have liked to ask him many things, things of mystery and of horror, but she was afraid. After all, how much better were the sea, the sunshine, the dog-rose, the barcarolle, the laughter, the lute!

She turned to Adrianis, who at that moment came along the sands of the beach, his hands filled with spoils from the blossoming hedges; turned to him as when, a little child on the staircase in the dusk, she had run to reach the shelter of a warmed and lighted room. He was of her own country, her own age, her own temperament; he carried about him a sense of gladness, an atmosphere of youth; he was of her own rank; he was as rich as she, and richer. There was no leaven of self-seeking in the love he bore her; the passion she had roused in him was pure of any alloy; it was the love of the poets and the singers. If she accepted it, her path, from youth to age, would be like one of those flowering meadows of his own Sicily which fill the cloudless day with perfume.

She knew that; her foot was ready to tread the narcissus-filled grass, but by an unaccountable indecision and caprice she would not let him invite her thither. She continually evaded or eluded the final words which would have united them or parted them.

Again and again, when that moment of decision could not have been postponed, the sombre shadow of Damer had appeared, as in the moment when the clasp of the necklace had been entangled in the little curls at the back of her throat.

It might be chance, it might be premeditation; but he was always there in those moments when the heart of Adrianis leaped to his eyes and lips and called to hers.