It was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at the Britania, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever interested him.
It did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of Venice, that he had not thought once of Eunice Goodward, but only of those who had touched his life without hurting it. He was so far indeed from thinking of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet her again.
"I must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."
He looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals, for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round hat who might have come from Bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the day after, and in the meantime Venice took him.
The ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. It was, as he told himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him, that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his dreams, missed them both on his own account.
It was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of Venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty droves of doves. High over the door the gold horses of Lysippus breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approaching temporale. He was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as it had been in the House!
It was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. He climbed up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which had failed to preserve to him any image of how his father looked, and yet had so furnished all his imagination. Which didn't make any less of a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, Peter Weatheral, of the firm of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Real Estate Brokers, what it was all about.
"It's a picture-book of the heart of man," he concluded, and no sooner had he shaped this thought in his mind than he heard it uttered for him on the opposite side of the pillar in a voice made soft by indulgent tenderness, "Just a great picture-book." He leaned forward at the sound far enough to have a glimpse of the Girl from Home, and smiled at her.
"So you've found that out, have you?" It was not strange to find himself addressing her friendlily nor to hear her answer him.
"Just a picture-book," she repeated. "It explains so much. What the saints were to them, and the Holy Personages. Monkish tales to prey upon their superstition, we were taught. But you can see here what they really were, the wonder tales of a people, the fairy wonder and the blessed happenings come true as they do in dreams. Oh, it must have been a good time when the saints were on the earth."