The Osbornes

by E. F. Benson

“And so through all the length of days—”

Mr. Osborne did not sing: his fat fingers closed on his wife’s rings, and he listened to her. He would not have listened then to Melba. He would not have been so completely absorbed if the seraphim had sung to him.

And then finally Dora looked at Claude. She thought she understood a little more. But she only saw a little more.

CHAPTER V.

IT was about two of the afternoon in the last week of May, and this sudden heat wave which had spread southward over Europe had reached Venice, making it more than ever a place to dream and be still in and less than ever a place to see sights in. So at any rate thought its foreign visitors, for the Grand Canal even and the more populous of the waterways were empty of pleasure-seeking and church-inspecting traffic, and but little even of the mercantile or more necessary sort was on the move. Here and there a barge laden with coke and wood fuel was being punted heavily upstream, clinging as far as might be to the side of the canal, where it would feel less of the tide that was strongly setting seaward, or here another carrying the stacked-up furniture of some migratory household passed down midstream so as to get the full aid and current of the tide avoided by the other. But apart from such traffic and the passage of the gray half-empty steamers that churned and troubled the water at regular intervals, sending the wash of their slanting waves against the walls of the white palaces, and making the moored and untenanted gondolas slap the water with sudden hollow complaints, and grind their sides uneasily against the restraining pali, there was but little stir of movement or passage. No lounger hung about on the steps of the iron bridge, and the sellers of fruit, picture postcards, and tobacco had taken their wares into the narrow strip of shade to the north of the Accademia, and waited, unexpectant of business, till the cool of the later hours should bring the forestieri into the street again.

Even the native population shunned the glare of the sun, and preferred, if it was necessary to go from one place to another, to seek the deep shadows of the narrow footways rather than face the heat and glare of the canals, and the boatmen in charge of the public ferries had moored their craft in the shade if possible, or, with heads sheltered beneath their discarded coats, passed the long siesta-hour with but little fear of interruption or call on their services. The domes and towers of the town glittered jewel-like against the deep blue of the sky, and their outlines trembled in the quiver of the reverberating air. On the north side of the Grand Canal the southward-facing houses dozed behind lattices closed to keep out the glare and the heat, and the air was still and noiseless but for the staccato chiding of the swallows which pursued their swift and curving ways with nothing of their speed abated. Over the horizon hung a purplish haze of heat, so that the edge of the sea melted indistinguishably into the sky, and Alps and Euganean hills alike were invisible.

Dora had lunched alone to-day, for Claude had gone to Milan to meet his father and mother, who were coming out for a fortnight and would arrive this evening; and at the present moment she was looking out from the window of her sala on to the lower stretch of the Grand Canal, which, as her intimacy with it deepened, seemed ever to grow more inexplicably beautiful. The flat which they occupied was on the south side of the canal, and though no doubt it would have left the room cooler to have closed all inlet of the baked air, she preferred to have the windows open, and lean out to command a larger view of the beloved waterway. Deep into her heart had the magic of the city of waters entered, a thing incomparable and incommunicable. She only knew that when she was away from Venice the thought of it caused her to draw long breaths, which hung fluttering in her throat; that when she was in it her eyes were never satisfied with gazing or herself with being soaked in it. She loved what was splendid in it, and what was sordid, what was small and what was great, its sunshine, its shadows, its moonlight, the pleasant Italian folk, and whether she sat in the jewelled gloom of St. Mark’s or shot out with the call of her gondolier from some dark waterway into the blaze of ivory moonlight on the Grand Canal below the Rialto, or whether the odour of roasting coffee or the frying of fish came to her as she passed some little caffe ristorante in the maze of mean streets that lie off the Merceria, or whether she lay floating at ease in the warm sustaining water of the Lido, or watched in the church of St. Georgio the mystic wreaths of spirits and archangels assembled round the table of the Last Supper, peopling the beamed ceiling of the Upper Chamber and mingling mistlike in the smoke of the lamp with which it was lit—she knew that it was Venice, the fact of Venice, that lay like a gold thread through these magical hours, binding them together, a circle of perfect pearls.

Two threads indeed ran through them all: they were doubly strong, for it was in Venice last autumn that she and Claude had passed three weeks of honeymoon and with the glory of the place was mingled the glory of her lover. It was that perhaps that gave to details and such sights and sounds as were not remarkable in themselves their ineffaceable character. It was because she and Claude had wandered, pleased to find themselves momentarily lost, in the high-eaved labyrinths of narrow streets, that the dingy little interiors, the trattorias with their smell of spilt wine, and their vine-leaf-stoppered bottles, their sharp savour of cooking and sawdust-sprinkled floors were things apart from anything that could be seen or perceived in any other town in the world. A spire of valerian sprouted from mouldering brickwork, the reflection of a marble lion’s head on snow-white cornice quivered in the gray-green water below, little sideway-scuttling crabs bustled over the gray mud of the lagoons, bent on private and oblique errands of their own, seagulls hovered at the edge of the retiring water; gray-stemmed pali with black heads leaned together, marking the devious course of deep-dug channels; there came a cry of “Stali” and a gondola with high-arching neck (some beautiful black swan) shot out of a canal by the bridge where they lingered, and these sights and sounds, trivial in themselves, were stamped in her mind with the royal mint-mark that belonged to those weeks when she and Claude were in Venice after their marriage. Her emotion had streamed from her, soaking them with it: they were part of Venice, part of herself, and so wholly hers.

Some seal had been set on those things then that could never be melted out. It was Claude who had set it there, and he had so imprinted that seal upon Venice that to her now all that was Venice had the memory of her honeymoon upon it like a hallmark on silver. That time had been a score of divine days, luminous with the southern sun, warm with stillness or clement wind, and yet made vigorous with the youth and freshness of the immortal sea. And here, six months afterward, she had returned with Claude to spend a month of late May and early June before the weeks of London. In the autumn she had come home under the enchantment and by way of a neat Christmas present Mr. Osborne had prospectively given her the rent, the journey, the expenses of food and wine, the servants and their journeys and their wages of a month, “or call it five weeks, my dear, and you won’t find me pulling you up short,” he had said, “of that house on the Grand Canal that took your fancy, Palazzo —— but there, I’ve no head for foreign names. You leave London, you do, with your maid and your cook, and your housemaid and what not, and don’t forget Claude, hey? or he’ll be quarrelling with you, and me taking his side too, though its only my fun. And you take a few English servants with you, as you can fall back upon, and you send me in a bill for all the tickets and the wages, and your living bills, and your gondolas, and that’s my Christmas present to you. Don’t you bother, but make yourself comfortable. You go as you please, as we used to say, for a month, or call it five weeks, and enjoy yourself, and let me know how much it’s all stood you in. I shouldn’t wonder if Mrs. O. and I didn’t come and join you, oh, not to make you uncomfortable, no fear, but to take another piazza, ah, palazzo you call it, and have a look at the Italians, and see what’s to be seen.”

Dora had an excellent aural memory, and as she sat at her window to-day, watching the flickering reflection in the water of the sunstruck houses opposite, she could almost hear Mr. Osborne’s voice saying these hospitable and free-handed things. But they did not get between her and her memory of the weeks in October. She was aware that during the last six months she had seen things differently to the way in which they were presented to her during those weeks, but it was not Venice that had altered. It was still Venice “as per last October,” as her father-in-law might have said.