"I don't know--I don't know," replied the old gentleman dubiously--"It will be bad enough when he sees my last pictures. No--no--I don't think I'll tell him. Foscari can look after the place. I need hardly be there at all while he's with us."
And then, making the sign of the cross upon each other's foreheads--saying--"God bless you"--as they had done every night their whole lives long, they fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE RETURN--VENICE
It was sunset when John arrived. The gondolas were riding on a sea of rose; the houses were standing, quietly, silently, as you will see cattle herd, knee-deep in the burning water. Here and there in the distance, the fiery sun found its reflection in some obscure window, and burnt there in a glowing flame of light. Then it was a city of rose and pink, of mauve and blue and grey, one shading into the other in a texture so delicate, so fine that the very threads of it could not be followed in their change.
John took a deep breath as he stepped into his gondola. It needed such colour as this to wash out the blackness of that night in London. It needed such stillness and such quiet to soothe the rancour of his bitterness; for the stillness of Venice is the hushed stillness of a church, where all anger is drugged to sleep and only the sorrow that one learns of can hold against the spell and keeps its eyes awake.
Now, in the desolation of his mind, John was learning, of the things that have true value and of those which have none. It is not an easy lesson to acquire, for the sacrifice of pre-conceived ideas can only be accomplished on the altar of bitterness and only the burning of despair can reduce them to the ashes in which lies the truth concealed.
Having deposited his belongings in his rooms in the Rio della Sacchere, where he always stayed, he set off on foot by the narrow little pathways to the Palazzo Capello.
That was always a moment in John's life when, upon his arrival every year, he first opened the big gate that closed on to the fondamenta. It was always a moment to be remembered when first he beheld, from beneath the archway, the glow of the flaming sunset in that old Italian garden, framed in the lace-worked trellises of iron.
Life had these moments. They are worth all the treasure of the Indies. The mind of a man is never so possessed of wealth as when he comes upon them; for in such moments as these, his emotions are wings which no sun of vaunted ambition can melt; in such moments as these, he touches the very feet of God.