“Claude met us at Milan, as he’ll have told you,” he said, “and saw us safe here last night. It’s strange, though, going to your house in a boat, and such a smell as there was at the last corner but one before we got here I never encountered. I should have had it looked into in no time if such a thing had occurred in the works at Sheffield. But it seems fine and open here, and I’ve no doubt we shall be well enough off. But to think of those old Doges with never a bathroom in their houses, nor hot water laid on nor nothing. But I enjoy that, my dear; I want to see the old life as they had it, and look at their palaces, ah! and live in one, and see their pictures, and think what manner of folk they was, being born and getting married and dying and all, in the very rooms we now occupy.”
Dora suddenly laughed.
“Oh, Dad,” she said, “you are too heavenly. But why have you put on those thick clothes? It’s going to be a roasting day. I am glad to see you. I’m sure you will find the house comfortable, and, oh! did you ever see such a morning? Look out there across the lagoon. It’s Venice, you know, Venice!”
Mr. Osborne looked out through the iron grille.
“Well, I’m sure it’s pretty enough,” he said, “and talk of sea air, why the sea’s all round you. We must have come a matter of a mile over the viaduct last night after we left the mainland. And sea air is what I want for mother; she wants a bit of setting up, and if she feels inclined to keep quiet and not look at the galleries and churches and sights every day, my dear, you’ll know it’s because she isn’t quite up to the mark. Well, well; no, I’m not anxious about her, for she takes her food, and was as pleased to come out here, such as never was, but she’s been a bit tired, and must take a rest.”
“She’s not ill?” asked Dora. “There’s nothing wrong?”
“Not a bit of it. ’Tis true, I wanted her to see the doctor before she left home, but she wouldn’t hear a word of it. Just to go to Venice, so she said, and see Claude and Dora, and not do much, that’s the prescription for me, she said. And so here we are, my dear. Lunch at half-past twelve, too; how strange it seems! But after the breakfast they gave me, just a bit of toast and an egg, I don’t doubt I shall be ready for it. But the coffee was prime, though it came up in an earthenware pot. I suppose it was that way the Doges took it. Lor’, to think of it all! Wedding the sea, too, every year. I read it in the guidebook on the journey. A curious custom that was, heathenish, you may say. It takes one back, doesn’t it?”
It was still an hour before lunch time, and at Dora’s suggestion they went out for a turn in her gondola which was waiting, since Mrs. Osborne was not to be expected down till lunch time. Mr. Osborne, still feeling the insecurity of a foreign land, refused to change into more suitable clothes, and, already perspiring profusely, embarked with a sense of being prepared for anything. As they got in Dora gave some short direction to her gondolier in Italian, and this roused his admiring curiosity.
“It’s a strange thing too,” he said, “that you say something of which I can’t understand a syllable, and round the boat goes, as if you’d said, ‘Right about turn.’ Such a bother as we had with luggage and what not, before Claude met us. But Mrs. O. saw the hang of it, and kept saying, ‘Venice, Palazzo Dandoli,’ whenever one of them brigands looked in on us, and it seemed they wanted no more than that. Brigands they looked, my dear, though I dare say they were honest men in the employment of their company. And what’s that now, that big telegraph-looking thing?”
He pointed at the huge disfiguring posts that brought the electric power into Venice.