CHAPTER XII
She was to meet the Clouds at Lucerne. She had hoped for Paris, but there was the Swiss-German adorer who would not be denied. Laura never found it easy to deny. So she spent a good-natured, chafing week in the Berne household, which, falling in love with her, enthusiastically and inexorably overfed her. From that hot-bed of sentiment and rich meals the train bore her away one fine spring morning, with a pimple on her tongue, but her duty done.
It was a bother being nice to people who bored you ... but it was the only way you could pay back the gods for being nice to you ... ran her philosophy. She only hoped the gods would go on being nice when they met again.... Two years was a long time.... Would the gods have altered much?... One can’t tell from photographs.... But gods don’t alter ... therein lies their godhead.... Now she, Laura——Oh, how she wondered if he would like her in long skirts?
The train fussed into the unplatformed station-way at half-past one, and tipped her out, as it seemed afterwards, onto the very lake edge, much as an elderly fairy, with a sense of duty, drops a stray godchild in elf-land for a week; and so puffed off again in its overworked fashion, leaving her, open-mouthed, before the enchanted hollow of Lucerne.
She might well gasp, forgetting her holiday, forgetting even “Justin-an’-Italy,” for long intoxicated minutes; for she was a painter, a painter unproven, a painter who had just sold her birthright for that same Justin-an’-Italy, but who was not therefore free of the torment of her eyes, her all-absorbing eyes and her itching finger-tips: and Lucerne was a portrait that day fit for the ten-leagued canvas and the brush of comet’s hair, a king’s daughter, glorious within, revealed and royal in a dazzle of blue.
It was a blue beyond belief, a blue enamelled thinly upon the gold plate of the sun, upon the antique-black of space itself. The great mountains, the rounded sky, the very air seemed carved, solidly, like the cup in the fairy tale, out of a single sapphire, fretted over with pearls that were clouds and the diamond glitter of the snow line, while far below the thin bridge lay across the lake like a felled tree in a clearing of English bluebells.
“My word!” marvelled Laura inadequately. “My word!” and then, with a deep breath—“Oh, my word!”
Her hand was at her mouth, hiding it because it trembled, as she stared and stared. She never outgrew that instinctive, characteristic gesture, that unconscious obedience to the law of her experience—“Never show what you feel.” Her delight in that triumphant blue was thoughtless, almost physical: she felt it whirl her like a wind. Yet, because she must always share her good things, at the back of her mind an indignant outcry began for “all of them” in forsaken Rue Honorine.
“My word! Wouldn’t they go mad! It’s a shame!”