II
The garden on the Giudecca was a long narrow strip on the seaward side, blossoming profusely with flowers. A low vine-covered villino slanted along the canal; beyond, there was a cow-house where a boy was feeding some glossy cows. The garden was full of the morning sun.
Lawrence could see her from the open door, a white figure, loitering in a bed of purple tulips. Her dark hair was loosely knotted up; stray wisps fell about her ears.
Lawrence closed the door that opened from the canal and walked softly through the plats of lilies and tulips. Miss Barton glanced up.
"Ecco! il cavaliere!"
"Didn't you expect me!" he asked, clumsily, revealing one potent reason for his appearance.
She smiled for an answer.
"Last night," he began again, explanatorily. Her eyes followed his lips and interrupted him.
"What do you think of our place?" She had turned away as if to direct his speech into indifferent channels.
He looked about bewildered.
"I can't think anything; I feel it; it's one mass of sense."
"Exactly. We found it, papa and I, one day two years ago when we were paddling around the Giudecca. One is so much at home here. At night you can see the lights along the Lido, and all the campaniles over there in Venice. Then the Redentore sweeps up so grandly—"
Lawrence slapped a bending tulip.
"Yes, the world lies far away."
"And you are afraid to lose sight of it," she turned on him swiftly. And she added, before he could find defence, "You have come to redeem your words, to tell me that you love me desperately; that you want to make an engagement; and some day marry me and go over there to live?"
She laughed.
"Well?"
"Caspar would do that."
"And Severance has something to offer," Lawrence remarked, bluntly.
"Half a million."
She began to walk slowly across the little grass-plot over to the Lido side. Here the oily swell was gurgling in the stone embankment.
She was like a plant flowering in the garden—a plant, part lily, part hyacinth.
"And you do not want me," she began, softly, less to him than to herself. "I don't fit in. You cannot take me up and put me aside, at your will. You would be mine."
"Good!"
"It should have been different. We should never have met. They should have made you a saint, or a priest, or a pastor for the bleeding world. You are a trifle late; half a century ago, you could have given your soul to God, quite easily, and not bothered about one woman."
"Yes, I agree, but that was settled by the way the world has ground," the young man sighed. "Why should it bother you, my fooling with the forlorn and wretched—the others? Any more than I mind your dealings with men?"
They turned about and crossed the dozen paces to the Redentore wall where lay a blade of dark shade.
"You could flirt with the multitude? Yes, I should object," she looked at him slowly, "I couldn't understand it."
He threw his head back as if to look beyond Venice.
"The maimed in body and spirit," he muttered.
"They call you; I call you; you——"
"I was starved," he pleaded, "I love flesh and glory, too."
She laughed unconcernedly.
"Oh, no. I think not. You are trying to very hard. You think you are enjoying your wine and your figs and the sun; but you say a prayer."
Her words taunted him. The vines on the villino swayed in the sun.
"Come, we will go out to the water, and I will master your doubt."
They stood silent, looking at each other, half curiously. At length she uttered what was common to their minds.
"Marry the world; it woos you. Love me and leave me; love another and leave her. The world, that is your mistress."
"And the world incarnate, that is you. The world, breathing, living, loving, the world a passion of delight."
Their hands touched for a moment. Then she said, hastily:
"Too late! There is Caspar. I forgot we were to go to Burano. Will you join us?"
A figure in white ducks was coming toward them. His cordial smile seemed to include a comment—a mental note of some hint he must give. "In stalks the world of time and place," the young man muttered. "No, I will not go with you."
He helped her into the waiting gondola. She settled back upon the cushions, stretched one languid arm in farewell. He could feel the smile with which she swept Caspar Severance, the women at work in the rio over their kettles, the sun-bright stretch of waters—all impartially.
He lay down in the shade of the Redentore wall. Eight weeks ago there had been a dizzy hour, a fainting scene in a crowded court-room, a consultation with a doctor, the conventional prescription, a fortnight of movement—then this. He had cursed that combination of nerve and tissue; equally he cursed this. One word to his gondolier and in two hours he could be on the train for Milan, Paris, London—then indefinite years of turning about in the crowd, of jostling and being jostled. But he lay still while the sun crept over him.
She was so unreal, once apart from her presence, like an evanescent mirage on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen her, heard her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had touched him; that there had been moments when she stood with the flowers of the garden.
He shook the drowsy sun from his limbs and went away, closing the door softly on the empty garden. Venice, too, was a shadow made between water and sun. The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of cool water alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens, until he came to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace façades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down of men.