She smiled.
"You were hurt about it at first," she reminded him.
"Yes--but then when you said--'John's thinking about becoming a man'--of course, it seemed natural enough then. And he's never done it since--till now. I wonder why."
The old gentleman went to bed very, very silent that night, and long after Claudina had taken away the lamp, he could feel John's lips burning on his forehead and the blood burning in his cheeks. Something had happened. He could not quite understand what it was. Some change had taken place. He felt quite embarrassed; but he fell asleep before he could realise that he was feeling just what John had felt that night when he was eight years old. That was what had happened--that was the change. The child was now father to the man--and the man was feeling the first embarrassment of the child--so the last link had been forged between the irrevocable past and the eternal present.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE CANDLE FOR ST. ANTHONY
If you know aught of the history of Venice; if the strenuous efforts of all those little lives that have done their work and lived their day in that vast multitude of human ephemera should have any meaning for you; if, in the flames of colour that have glowed and vanished in the brazier of Time, you can see faces and dream dreams of all that romantic story, then it is no wasting of a sunny morning to sit alone upon the Piazetta, your face turned towards San Giorgio Maggiore and, with the sun glinting upwards from the glittering water, weave your visions of great adventure in the diaphanous mist of light.
It was in such a way as this that John was spending one day when he could not work, when the little old white-haired lady was busy with Claudina over the duties of the house, when his father had departed upon that engrossing errand of seeing to the framing of a picture.
The sun was a burning disc, white hot in a smelter's furnace. A few white sails of cloud lay becalmed, inert, asleep in a sky of turquoise. John sat there blinking his eyes and the windows in the houses on San Giorgio blinked back in sleepy recognition as though the heat was more than they could bear. Away down the Giudecca, the thin bare masts of the clustering vessels tapered into the still air--giant sea-grass, which the sickle of a storm can mow down like rushes that grow by the river's edge. Their reflections wriggled like a nest of snakes in the dancing water, the only moving thing in that sleepy day. Everything else was noiseless; everything else was still.
John gazed at it all through half-closed eyes, till the point of the Campanile across the water seemed to melt in the quivering haze, and the dome of the chiesa was lost in the light where the sun fell on it. What had changed? What was different to his eyes that had been for the eyes of those thousands of workers who had toiled and fought, lived and died, like myriads of insects to build this timeless city of light, this City of Beautiful Nonsense? What had altered? A few coping stones, perhaps, a few mosaics renewed; but that was all. It was just the same as it had been in the days of the Council of Ten; just the same as when Petrarch, from his window on the Riva degli Schiavona, sat watching the monster galleys ride out in all their pomp and blazonry across the pearl and opal waters of the lagoons.