"There is the one person among your audience whom etiquette demands that you shall crown with some of your flowers of oratory," pursued the charming flatterer, alluding to the Queen. "I believe that, in one of your earlier books, you own to a taste and respect for ceremonials. One of your most extraordinary flights of fancy is that description of a day of Charles the Second, King of Spain."
When the royal barge passed the gondola, the man and the woman saluted it. The Queen, recognizing the poet, the author of Persephone, and the distinguished tragic actress, turned to gaze at them with a movement of instinctive curiosity. She was blonde and rosy, and her face was lighted by her ever-ready smile, as she looked out from the cloud of creamy Buranesi laces clinging around her shoulders. Beside her sat Andriana Duodo, the patroness of Burano, where, on that industrious little island, she cultivated flax, and raised the most marvelous old-fashioned flowers.
"Does it not seem to you that the smiles of those two women are so similar as to be twin-like?" said La Foscarina, gazing at the silvery ripples in the wake of the barge, wherein the double light seemed to prolong its self.
"The Countess has a magnificent and ingenuous soul—one of those rare Venetian spirits that preserve their warmth, as their ancient paintings retain their vivid color," said Stelio, earnestly, as if in gratitude. "I have an absolute devotion for her sensitive hands. They fairly quiver with pleasure when they touch rare lace or rich velvet, lingering over the texture with a grace that seems almost shy of betraying such voluptuous joy in mere touch. One day, when I had accompanied her to the gallery of the Academia, she stopped before the Massacre des Innocents by the first Bonifazio. You recollect, of course, the green robe of the prostrate woman that one of Herod's soldiers is about to kill—a thing impossible to forget! She paused long before it, seeming fairly to radiate from her own person the perfect joy that filled her senses; then she said to me, 'Let us leave this place now, Effrena! Take me away, but I must leave my eyes on that robe—I cannot look at anything more!' Ah, do not smile at her, dear friend! She was perfectly simple and sincere in saying that: she really did leave her spiritual vision behind her on that bit of canvas which Art, with a touch of color, has made the center of an infinitely pleasurable mystery. Besides, it was really a blind woman that I accompanied there, but I was suddenly seized with reverence for the privileged soul for whom the magic of color had power to abolish for the moment all memory of commonplace life, and to cut off all other worldly communication. What should you call such a state of mind? A filling of life's goblet to the brim, it seems to me. It is exactly what I should like to do to-night, if I were not discouraged."
A new clamor, louder and more prolonged, rose between the two guardian columns of granite, as the royal barge approached the bank of the Piazzetta, now black with the waiting throng. During the slight pause that followed, the movement of the crowd shifted, like the changing of eddies in a current, and all the galleries of the Palace of the Doges were filled with a confused buzzing, like the mysterious murmur within a sea-shell. Suddenly the buzz rose to a shout, rending the clear air and finally dying away in the gathering twilight. The multitude seemed to realize the divinity of that poetic hour, amid those incomparable surroundings; and perhaps, in its acclaim to youthful royalty and beauty, it expressed a vague longing to forget its prosaic existence, and to revel in the gift of eternal poetry with which its storied walls and waters were endowed.
"Do you know, Perdita," Stelio suddenly exclaimed, "of any other place in the world that possesses, like Venice, at certain times, the power to stimulate all the forces of human life by the exaltation of all desires to a feverish intensity? Do you know of any more irresistible temptress?"
She whom he called Perdita did not reply; she bent her head as if from desire to concentrate her thoughts; but through all her being she felt the indefinable thrill always felt at the sound of the voice of her friend when it revealed the vehemence and passionate soul toward which this woman was drawn by a mingling of love and terror that had no limit.
"Peace! Oblivion! Do you find them down there, at the end of that deserted canal, when you go home exhausted and fevered after inhaling the commingled breath of the crowd that you are able to rouse to wild enthusiasm by a single gesture? As for myself, when I float on these dead waters, I feel my vital powers increase with bewildering rapidity; at certain times my brain seems on fire, as if I were in delirium."
"The flame and the power are within yourself, Stelio," said La Foscarina almost humbly, without raising her eyes.
He was silent, absorbed. Poetic imagery and impetuous music took form within his brain, as if by virtue of some magic fecundation; and his spirit reveled in the unexpected delight of that flood of inspiration.