“It seems so absurd,” I replied. “What did she expect; to be always a goddess?”
“Ah, there you go!” he burst out again, with flashing eyes. “That is just like a cold-blooded materialist. I hate your modern Shylock, who can see a pound of flesh cut from a human heart with no care for the hot blood that follows. Have you no sympathy deep down in your soul for a woman when she realizes for the first time that her hold on the world is slipping? Can you not understand the agony of the awakening from a long dream of security and supremacy, when she finds that others are taking her place? The daily watching for the loss of color, the fullness of the waist, the penciling of care-lines about the eyes? We men have bodily force and mental vigor, and sometimes lifelong integrity, to commend us, and as we grow older and the first two fail, the last serves us best of all; but what has a woman like the Contessa left? I am not talking of an ordinary woman, nor of all the good daughters, good wives, and good mothers in the world. You expect in such women the graces of virtue, duty, and resignation. I am talking of a superb creature whom the good God created just to show the world what the angels looked like. I insist that before you laugh you must put yourself in the place of this noble Contessa whom all Venice adored, whose reign for fifteen years had been supreme, whose beauty was to her something tangible, a weapon, a force, an atmosphere. She had all the other charms that adorned the women of her day, good-humor, a rich mind, charity, and wit, but so had a hundred other Venetians of her class. I insist that before censuring her, you enter the salon and watch with her the faces of her guests, noting her eagerness to detect the first glance of delight or disappointment, and her joy or chagrin as she reads the verdict in their eyes. Can you not realize that in a beauty such as hers there is an essence, a spirit, a something divine and ethereal? A something like the bloom on these grapes, adding the exquisite to their lusciousness; like the pure color of the diamond, intensifying its flash? A something that, in addition to all her other qualities, makes a woman transcendent and should make her immortal? We men long for this divine quality, adore it, go mad over it; and yet when it has faded, with an inconstancy and neglect which to me is one of the enigmas of human nature, we shrug our shoulders, laugh, and pass on. Believe me, mon ami, when that gondolier confirmed the looking-glass of the Contessa, his words fell upon her ears like earth upon her coffin.”
If the Professor’s emotion at the close of the story was a surprise to me, this frenzied outburst, illogical and quixotic as it seemed, was equally unexpected. I could hardly realize that this torrent of fiery passion and pent-up energy had burst from the frail, plain little body before me. Again and again, as I looked at him, the thought ran through my mind, Whom had he loved like that? What had come between himself and his own Contessa? Why was this man an exile—this cheery, precise, ever courteous dignified old thoroughbred, with his dry, crackling exterior, and his volcano of a heart beneath? Or was it Venice, with her wealth of traditions,—traditions he had made his own,—that had turned his head?
Long after the Professor left the garden, I sat looking about me, noting the broken walls overhung with matted vines, and the little lizards darting in and out. Then I strolled on and entered the doorway of the old château, and looked long and steadily at the ruined balcony, half buried in a tangle of roses, the shadows of their waving blossoms splashing the weather-stained marble; and thence to the apartment above, where these same blossoms thrust themselves far into its gloom, as if they too would search for the vision of loveliness that had vanished. Then I wandered into an alcove sheltering the remains of an altar and font—the very chapel, no doubt, where the good priest had married her; on through the unkept walks bordered on each side by rows of ancient box, with here and there a gap where the sharp tooth of some winter more cruel than the rest had bitten deep, and so out again into the open garden, where I sat down under a great tree that sheltered the head of a Madonna built into the wall—the work of Canova, the Professor had told me.
Despite my own convictions, I seem to feel the presence of these spirits of the past that the Professor, in his simple, earnest way, had conjured up before me, and to see on every hand evidences of their long life of happiness. The ruined balcony, with its matted rose vines, had now a deeper meaning. How often had the beautiful Venetian leaned over this same iron grating and watched her lover in the garden below! On how many nights, made glorious by the radiance of an Italian moon, had they listened to the soft music of passing gondolas beyond the garden walls?
The whole romance, in spite of its improbability and my thoughtless laughter, had affected me deeply. Why, I could not tell. Perhaps it was the Professor’s enthusiasm; perhaps his reverence for the beauty of woman, as well as for the Contessa herself. Perhaps he had really been recalling a chapter out of his own past, before exile and poverty had made him a wanderer and a dreamer. Perhaps!—Yes, perhaps it was the thought of the long, quiet life of the Contessa with her lover in this garden.
AMONG THE FISHERMEN
I KNOW best the fishing quarter of Ponte Lungo and the district near by, from the wooden bridge to the lagoon, with the side canal running along the Fondamenta della Pallada. This to me is not only the most picturesque quarter of Venice, but quite the most picturesque spot I know in Europe, except, perhaps, Scutari on the Golden Horn.
This quality of the picturesque saturates Venice. You find it in her stately structures; in her spacious Piazza, with its noble Campanile, clock tower, and façade of San Marco; in her tapering towers, deep-wrought bronze, and creamy marble; in her cluster of butterfly sails on far-off, wide horizons; in her opalescent dawns, flaming sunsets, and star-lit summer nights. You find it in the gatherings about her countless bridges spanning dark water-ways; in the ever-changing color of crowded markets; in lazy gardens lolling over broken walls; in twisted canals, quaint doorways, and soggy, ooze-covered landing-steps. You find it, too, in many a dingy palace—many a lop-sided old palace—with door-jambs and windows askew, with lintels craning their heads over the edge, ready to plunge headlong into the canal below.