It seemed rather to have taken a sweep upward when, with sails swelling over them and the beat of the sea under the bows, they stood up to be married, and to exhibit capacities of sustaining itself at a level from which not the very soggy and sallow complexioned pie with the cook grinning behind it, could dislodge the two most concerned in it. It wore through the day to a contained and quiet gayety at a dinner which took place in the ristoranta over the water where they had once lunched with the captain, and lasted until Peter had brought his wife home again to the refurnished palace. It had gone, as he told himself, remarkably well, with every intimation, as he had time to tell himself in his last hours in the garden with his cigar, of going much better, of becoming as the place gave him occasion to indulge the figure, an enclosed and fragrant garden, in which if no flaming angel of desire kept the gate for him, he had at least the promise of refreshment.
That old passion for Eunice Goodward, all his feelings for all the women he had known, served to show him what Savilla had meant when she said he "gave her so much room"—the renewed sense of the spaciousness of life.
It would be there for his wife at the completest, and if she had, as it seemed, turned him out of the Wonderful House in order to live in it herself, he at least kept the gates. And was not this the proper business for a man? He recalled what the Princess had said to him so long ago when he had first begun to think of himself as a bachelor. "It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass." Well, he had dreamed and he had slain some dragons. Later there would be children playing in the House, daughters perhaps ... Lovely Ladies. The world would be a better place for them to walk about in because of all that he had lost and been.
When he went into the garden he had half expected that the Princess would speak to him; the place was full of hints of her, faint and persuasive as the scent of the flowers in the dark, little riffles of his pulse, flushed surfaces, the tingling of his palms which announced her, but she did not speak. He said to himself that he was now a well man and had seen the last of her. Never before had he felt so very well.
He saw the light moving in the palace behind him as his wife moved to complete some of her arrangements; he heard her then pacing along the marble floor of the great hall which went quite through the middle of it—she must be going to her room, and in a little while he would go in to her—he heard the light tapping of her feet and then he saw her come, the lit lamp in her hand.
She had on still the white dress in which she had been married, and over it she had thrown the silver-woven scarf which had been one of his first gifts to her, and as she came the light glittered on it; it drew from the polished walls bright reflections in which, amid the gilded frames, he saw the dim old pictures start and waver—and as he saw her coming so, Peter threw away his cigar and gripped suddenly at the balustrade to steady him where he stood, against what out of some far spring of his youth rushed upon him, as he saw her come—as he had always seen her, as he knew now he was to see her always—his wife and the Lovely Lady.
THE END
