Chapter VIII

In the evening she was usually at home. She did not as yet go to balls or theatres; the aristocratic society of Venice flocked to her rooms, and what was best in the foreign element. In the evenings neither Adrianis nor Damer saw her alone; but in the daytime, on the island or in the water excursions, sometimes one or the other was beside her for a few minutes with no listener near.

Adrianis eagerly sought such occasions; Damer never seemed to seek them. He was often in her palace and on her island, but appeared to be so chiefly because he went where Adrianis went. No one could have told that he took pleasure in doing so.

But Adrianis, somewhat surprised at his lingering so long, thought to himself: “He was to be in Gottenberg by the 10th of May, and it is now the 23rd.”

“Have you given up your appointment?” he asked once, directly.

Damer merely answered, “No.” He did not offer any explanation; but he continued to stay on in Venice, though he had removed from the fine apartments occupied by his friend to a house on the Fondamenti Nuovi, where he had hired two chambers.

Adrianis, who was very generous and had always a grateful and uneasy sense of unrepaid obligation, vainly urged him to remain at his hotel. But Damer, somewhat rudely, refused.

“I cannot pursue any studies there,” he replied.

The house he had chosen was obscure and uninviting, standing amidst the clang of coppersmiths’ hammers and the stench of iron-foundries in what was once the most patrician and beautiful garden-quarter of Venice, but which is now befouled, blackened, filled with smoke, and clamour, and vileness, where once the rose-terraces and the clematis-covered pergole ran down to the lagoon, and the marble stairs were white as snow under silken awnings.

“What do you do there?” Veronica Zaranegra wished to ask him; but she never did so; she felt vaguely afraid as a woman of the Middle Age would have feared to ask a magician what he did with his alembics and his spheres.

Although the eyes of lovers are proverbially washed by the collyrium of jealousy, those of Adrianis were blind to the passion which Damer, like himself, had conceived. The reserve and power of self-restraint in Damer were extreme, and served to screen his secret from the not very discerning mind of his companion. Moreover, the pride of race which was born and bred in Adrianis rendered it impossible for him to suspect that he possessed a rival in one who was, however mentally superior, so far socially inferior, to himself and to the woman he loved.

That a man who was going to receive a stipend as a teacher in a German university could lift his eyes to Veronica Zaranegra would have seemed wholly impossible to one who had been reared in patrician and conservative tenets. He never noticed the fires which slumbered in the cold wide-opened eyes of his friend and monitor. He never observed how frequently Damer watched him and her when they were together, listened from afar to their conversation, and invariably interrupted them at any moment when their words verged on more tender or familiar themes. He was himself tenderly, passionately, romantically enamoured; his temper was full of a romance to which he could not often give adequate expression; his love for her had the timidity of all sincere and nascent passion; he was pained and chafed by the manner in which she avoided his definite declaration of it, but he did not for a moment trace it to its right cause, the magnetic influence which the Englishman had upon her, the hesitation which was given her by vague hypnotic suggestion. If any looker-on had warned him, he would have laughed and said that the days of magic were past.

He himself only counted time by the hours which brought him into her presence on the water, on the island, or in the evening receptions in the palace. He made water-festivals and pleasure-cruises to please her; he had sent for his own sailing yacht from Palermo. The long, light days of late spring and earliest summer passed in a series of ingenious amusements of which the sole scope was to obtain a smile from her. Often she did smile, the radiance of youth and of a woman’s willingness to be worshipped shining on her fair countenance as the sun shone on the sea. Sometimes also the smile ceased suddenly when, from a distance, her eyes encountered those of Damer.

All that was most delightful in life offered itself to her in the homage of Adrianis: his mother’s welcome, his southern clime, his great love, his infinite tenderness and sweetness of temper, his great physical beauty. She longed to accept these great gifts; she longed to feel his arms folded about her and his cheek against hers; and yet she hesitated, she delayed, she avoided, because in the eyes of another man, whom she disliked and feared, she read mockery, disdain, and superiority. She could not have said what it was that she felt any more than the young spaniel could tell what moves it as it looks up into human eyes, and reads authority in them, and crouches, trembling.

Why did he stay here? she asked herself, this cold, still, irresponsive man, who had nothing in him which was not alien to the youthful and pleasure-loving society in which he found himself, and who was by his own admission already overdue at the university to which he had been appointed.

“Are you not losing time?” she said once to him; “we are so frivolous, so ignorant, so unlike you.”

“I never lose time,” replied Damer. “An amœba in a pool on the sand is companion enough for me.”

Seeing that she had no idea of what he meant, he added:

“A man of science is like an artist; his art is everywhere, wherever natural forms exist.”

“Or like a sportsman,” said Adrianis, who was listening; “his sport is everywhere, wherever there are living things to kill.”

“Put it so if you please,” said Damer. But he was annoyed; he disliked being answered intelligently and sarcastically by one whom he considered a fool. Whatever Adrianis said irritated him, though it was almost perpetually courteous and simple, as was the nature of the speaker.

Damer read the young man’s heart like an open book and he knew that it was wholly filled with the image of Veronica. He had never liked Adrianis; he had no liking for youth or for physical beauty, or for kindliness and sweetness and simplicity of character. Such qualities were not in tune with him; they were no more to him than the soft, thick fur of the cat in his laboratory, which he stripped off her body that he might lay bare her spinal cord; the pretty, warm skin was nothing to science—no more than was the pain of the bared nerves.

He had saved the life of Adrianis because it had interested and recompensed him to do so; he had travelled with him for a year because it suited him financially to do so; but he had never liked him, he had never been touched by any one of the many generous and delicate acts of the young man, nor by the trust which the mother of Adrianis continually expressed in her letters to himself. Where jealousy sits on the threshold of the soul, goodness and kindness and faith knock in vain for admittance. Envy is hatred in embryo; and only waits in the womb of time for birth.