CHAPTER XXXI.
Two weeks later, in Venice, the doorkeeper of the Hotel Bauer gave Pan Stanislav a letter with the postmark of Warsaw. It was at the moment when he and his wife were entering a gondola to go to the church of Santa Maria della Salute, where on that day, the anniversary of her death, a Mass was to be offered for the soul of Marynia’s mother. Pan Stanislav, who expected nothing important from Warsaw, put the letter in his pocket, and asked his wife,—
“But is it not a little too early for Mass?”
“It is; a whole half hour.”
“Then perhaps it would please thee to go first to the Rialto?”
Marynia was always ready to go. Never having been abroad before, she simply lived in continual rapture, and it seemed to her that all which surrounded her was a dream. More than once, in the excess of her delight, she threw herself on her husband’s neck, as if he had built Venice, as if she ought to thank him alone for its beauty. More than once she repeated,—
“I look and I see, but cannot believe that this is real.”
So they went to the Rialto. There was little movement yet, because of the early hour; the water was as if sleeping, the day calm, clear, but not very bright,—one of those days in which the Grand Canal with all its beauty has the repose of a cemetery; the palaces seem deserted and forgotten, and in their motionless reflection in the water is that peculiar deep sadness of dead things. One looks at them then in silence, and as if in fear, lest by words the general repose may be broken.
Thus did Marynia look. But Pan Stanislav, less sensitive, remembered that he had a letter in his pocket, hence he drew it forth, and began to read. After a time he exclaimed,—