"Do you know, it strikes me that it would work just the other way, and that hands would presently clasp nothing but daggers' hilts. But there is another question.—How will one fair hand of truth live among a crowd of steel gauntlets?"
"What?" Mr. Linden said, with a little bending of his brows upon the doctor. "I am wearing neither glove nor gauntlet,—what are you talking about?—And my half-finished letter is a fact and no pretence."
"I sha'n't believe you," said the doctor, "if you give my fingers such a wring as that. Well, go to your letter, and I'll take Miss Derrick to Venice—if she will let me."
Venice!—That exquisite photograph of the Bridge of Sighs, and "the palace and the prison on each hand," about which such a long, long entrancing account had been given by Mr. Linden to her—the scene and the talk rose up before Faith's imagination; she was very ready to go to Venice. Its witching scenery, its strange history, floated up, in a fascinating, strange cloud-view; she was ready for Shylock and the Rialto. Nay, for the Rialto, not for Shylock; him, or anything like him, she had never seen nor imagined. She was only sorry that Mr. Linden had to go to his letter; but there was a compensative side to that, for her shyness was somewhat less endangered. With only the doctor and Shylock to attend to, she could get along very well.
Shyness and fears however, were of very short endurance. To Venice she went,—Shylock she saw; and then she saw nothing else but Shylock, and those who were dealing with him; unless an occasional slight glance towards the distant table where Mr. Linden sat at his writing, might be held to signify that she had powers of vision for somewhat else. It did not interrupt the doctor's pleasure, nor her own. Dr. Harrison had begun with at least a double motive in his mind; but man of the world as he was, he forgot his unsatisfied curiosity in the singular gratification of reading such a play to such a listener. It was so plain that Faith was in Venice! She entered with such simplicity, and also with such intelligence, into the characters and interests of the persons in the drama; she relished their words so well; she weighed in such a nice balance of her own the right and the wrong, the true and the false, of whatever rested on nature and truth for its proper judgment;—she was so perfectly and deliciously ignorant of the world and the ways of it! The fresh view that such pure eyes took of such actors and scenes, was indescribably interesting; Dr. Harrison found it the best play he had ever read in his life. He made it convenient sometimes to pause to indoctrinate Faith in characters or customs of which she had no adequate knowledge; it did not hurt her pleasure; it was all part of the play.
In the second scene, the doctor stopped to explain the terms on which
Portia had been left with her suitors.
"What do you think of it?"
"I think it was hard," said Faith smiling.
"What would you have done if you had been left so?"
"I would not have been left so."