"Oh, I dare say he'll come sometimes. Do you like him, then?"
"I don't know; he is very young, is he not?"
"I haven't asked his age, but I dare say he'll tell you."
"I should not ask him. Men do not like to tell their age. He never would. Why are you paying for this house you speak of? You have no right to pay for anything for me. You know that very well."
The question gave him his opportunity, and he told her as much of the story as she could comprehend. Her father had been the best friend he had ever known. He had taken his mother to America at the crisis of her fortunes. It was an obligation he could never forget. He had meant to do so much in return, but fate was against them both. They must act together henceforth and make the best of their lives they could. She must help him to honour his mother's name. In her turn Maryska replied but vaguely. He had thought that she was not listening, but when he had finished, and following a little interval of silence, she threw herself back upon her cushions and cried wildly, "Jesus Christ! I never had a mother to honour." And that surely was as lamentable a confession as any he had heard from her lips.
VI
They were off Venice upon the following night, and so favoured by fortune that the waxing moon gave them a vista of the hundred isles, beautiful beyond compare.
A still sea hardly stirred a ripple upon the sandy shores of the Lido. Venice herself stood up in a haze of soft light, her spires and domes rising above the vast lagoon of untroubled waters, dim, mysterious, entrancing. Seen from afar, she might have been a great house of dreams; her windows so many stars above a silent lake; her palaces but the dark clouds of a vision. As phantoms about them, ships drifted upon a reluctant tide; sails took shape and glided away, spectres of an instant, into the deeper shadows. There were musical voices crying out of the darkness; notes of song most pleasing; the dwelling reverberations of ancient bells to tell of hours which should have been unnumbered. As they drew nearer still and the Dogana took shape with the vast dome of the Maria della Salute beyond it, then it was as though the centuries spoke with one voice, and all the lustre and the achievement of a thousand years were revealed in a splendid instant. So is it ever for those who approach Venice from the sea and obliterate the black modernity which wrestles with her story. Such is the vision of her which Turner beheld.
Faber watched the spectacle from the boat deck, and was far from displeased to find Gabrielle at his side. There had been few opportunities for confidential talk since they sailed from Ragusa, and she herself had said no word to lead him to believe that the course of her life was about to be changed. Very stately in mien this night, her height accentuated by the place where she stood, her hair a little wild beneath her wrap, eyes very bright and searching, her manner restful, he wondered whence came the "aristocrat" in her lineage, and how a mere manse had sent forth such a missioner. Let the assembly be what it might, Gabrielle Silvester would take a proud place. Intellectually she was far above him in education and artistic perception, but he suffered a sense of inferiority with patience, and admired her the more because she could awaken it. Bertie Morris had said that she was "cold and Saxon." Faber doubted the truth of that.
They discussed many things in an ordinary way. She spoke of the story of Venice and found him skilfully parrying his own ignorance. He knew little of the history of the place—had heard of St. Mark's and of the "Three." The lion's mouth struck him as a fine idea. There ought to be one in every city for cranks and faddists, he said, and a special box for politicians and newspaper men. When she asked him if the vision of the city suggested nothing more, he thrust his hands into his pockets and said that it reminded him of New York Bay.