"He thinks you should," she spoke, calmly. "He has been talking two hours about you, your future, your brilliant performances----"
"That detained you!"
"He is plotting to make you a great man. You belong to the world, he said, and, the world would have you. They need you to plan and exhort, I believe."
"So you come to tell me--"
"Let us go out to the garden." She laid her hand reprovingly on his arm. "We can see the pictures later."
She took his arm and directed him down the arched walk between the vines, toward the purple sea.
"I did not realize that--that you were a little Ulysses. He warned me!"
"Indeed!"
"That you would love and worship at any wayside shrine; that the spirit of devotion was not in you."
"And you believed?"
She nodded.
"It seemed so. I have thought so. Once a few feet away and you are wondering!"
The young man was guiltily silent.
"And I am merely a wayside chapel, good for an idle prayer."
"Make it perpetual."
Her arm was heavy.
"Caspar wants you--away. He will try to arrange it. Perhaps you will yield, and I shall lose."
"You mean he will make them recall me."
She said nothing.
"You can end it now." He stopped and raised her arm. They stood for a moment, revolving the matter; a gardener came down the path. "You will get the message tonight," she said, gloomily. "Go! The message will say "come," and you will obey."
Lawrence turned.
"Shall we see the pictures?"
The peasant girl admitted them to the hall, and opened, here and there, a long shutter. The vast hall, in the form of a Latin cross, revealed a dusky line of frescoes.
"Veronese," she murmured. Lawrence turned to the open window that looked across the water to the piazza. Beneath, beside the quay, a green-painted Greek ship was unloading grain. Some panting, half-naked men were shovelling the oats.
"We might go," he said; "Caspar is probably waiting for his report. You can tell him that he has won."
Suddenly he felt her very near him.
"No, not that way!"
"You are good to--love," she added deliberatively, placing her hands lightly on his heart.
"You do not care enough; ah! that is sad, sad. Caspar, or denial, or G.o.d--nothing would stand if you cared, more than you care for the little people and things. See, I can take you now. I can say you are mine. I can make you love--as another may again. But love me, now, as if no other minute could ever follow."
She sighed the words.
"Here I am, to be loved. Let us settle nothing. Let us have this minute for a few kisses."
The hall filled with dusk. The girl came back again. Suddenly a bell began ringing.
"Caspar," she said. "Stay here; I will go."
"We will go together."
"No," she waved him back. "You will get the message. Caspar is right.
You are not for any woman for always."
"Go," he flung out, angrily.
The great doors of the hall had rattled to, leaving him alone half will-less. He started and then returned to the balcony over the fondamenta. In the half-light he could see her stepping into a waiting gondola, and certain words came floating up clearly as if said to him----
"To-morrow evening, the Contessa Montelli, at nine." But she seemed to be speaking to her companion. The gondola shot out into the broad ca.n.a.l.
VI
The long June day, Lawrence sat with the yellow cablegram before his eyes. The message had come, indeed, and the way had been cleared.
Eleven--the train for Paris! pa.s.sed; then, two, and now it was dusk again.
Had she meant those words for him? So carelessly flung back. That he would prove.
"The signorina awaits you." The man pointed to the garden, and turned back with his smoking lamp up the broad staircase that clung to one side of the court. Across the strip of garden lay a bar of moonlight on the gra.s.s.
She was standing over the open well-head at the farther end where the gra.s.s grew in rank tufts. The gloomy wall of the palace cast a shadow that reached to the well. Just as he entered, a church-clock across the rio struck the hour on a cracked bell.
"My friend has gone in--she is afraid of the night air," Miss Barton explained. "Perhaps she is afraid of ghosts," she added, as the young man stood silent by her side. "An old doge killed his wife and her children here, some centuries ago. They say the woman walks. Are you afraid?"
"Of only one ghost----"
"Not yet a ghost!" Indeed, her warm, breathing self threw a spirit of life into the moonlight and gainsaid his idle words.
"I have come for you," he said, a little peremptorily. "To do it I have lost my engagement with life."