The gondola shot alongside the tiny wharf, and he stepped on to its stone flags. He stood silent a moment, feeling the calm upon him like a tangible hand. Far to the north, half a league’s distance, glowing through the bluish winter haze, shone the towers and domes of Venice, a city of white and violet, vague and unsubstantial as a dream, a field of iris painted upon a cloud.
“Go back to the city.”
The servant was startled. “And leave you, Excellence?”
“Yes, I shall send when I need you.”
The boatman leaned anxiously on his oar. “When they question, Excellence?”
“Tell no one but Fletcher where I am. Say to him it is my wish that he shall not leave the palazzo.”
He watched the gondola glide away over the lightening waters, till it was only a spot on the dimpling lagoon. He took a black phial from his pocket and threw it far out into the water. Then he turned his gaze and walked up the wharf toward the monastery, still soundless and asleep.
At the corner of the sea-wall, the stone had been hollowed with the chisel into a niche, in which, its face turned seaward, stood a small leaden image of the Virgin. He noted it curiously, with the same sensation of the unartificial he had felt at sight of the wooden shrine at La Mira. And yet with all its primitive simplicity, what a chasm between such a concrete embodiment of a personal guardianship and that agnostic altar his youth had erected “to the unknown God”!
He looked up and saw a figure hear him.
A man of venerable look stood there, bareheaded, with a wide gray beard which swept upon his coarse dark robe. His eyes were deep and pleasant, and his countenance spiritual, gracious and reserved. An open gate in the wall showed the way he had come.