"and you are sure," asked peter, "that you are not going to mind my being so much older?"
"oh, i'm going to mind it: there will be times when i shall be afraid of not living up to it. but the most part of my minding will be, since you are so much better acquainted with life than i am, that in any matter in which we shouldn't agree i shall be so much the more sure of your being right. it's going to be a great help to us, having something like that to go by."
"oh," said peter, "you put it very prettily, my dear."
he was aware as soon as he had said it, that she would have a way always of putting[pg 260] things prettily, and that not for the sake of any prettiness, but because it was so intrinsically she saw them. it would make everything much simpler that she was always sufficiently to be believed.
"it isn't, you know," she went on, "as if i should have continually to prop up my confidence with my affection as i might with a man of less experience. oh!" she threw out her arms with a beautiful upward motion, "you give me so much room, peter."
"well, more than i would give you at this moment if we were not in a gondola on a public highway!"
he amazed himself at the felicity with which during the three days of their engagement he had been able to take that note with her, still more at the entertainment of her shy response. it gave him a new and enlarged perception of himself as a man acquainted with passion. all that had been withheld from him, by the mere experience of missing, he was able to bestow with largesse. the witchery and charm that had been done on him, he worked—if he were but to put his arm about her now, to draw her[pg 261] so that her head rested on his shoulder, with a certain pressure, he could feel all her being flower delicately to that beguilement. he had promised himself, when he had her promise, that she should never miss anything, and he had a certain male satisfaction in being able to make good. what he did now, in deference to their being as they were in the full light of day and the plying traffic, was to say:
"then if i were to put it to you in the light of my superior experience, that i considered it best for us to be married right away, i shouldn't expect you to contradict me."
"oh, peter!"
"we can't keep mrs. merrithew on forever, you know," he suggested, "and we've such a lot to do—there's greece and egypt and the holy land——"
"but can we—be married in venice, i mean?"
"that," said peter, "is what i'm waiting your permission to find out."
he spent the greater part of the afternoon at that business without, however, getting satisfaction. "marriage in italy," the consul told him,[pg 262] "is a sort of world-without-end affair. even if you cable for the necessary papers it will be a matter of a month or six weeks before the ceremony could be accomplished. you'll do better to go to switzerland with the young lady."
for the present he went back to her with a list of the required certificates, and another item which he brought out later as a corrective for the disappointment for the first.
"my birth and baptismal certificates? i haven't any," said miss dassonville, "and i don't believe you have either; and i don't want to go to switzerland."
"no," said peter, "even that takes three weeks."
"why can't he marry us himself—the consul, i mean? i thought wherever the flag went up was territory of the united states."
"if you will come along with me in the morning we can ask him," peter suggested, and on the way there he loosed for her benefit the second item of his yesterday's discovery. they slid past the façade of a certain palace and she kissed the tip of her finger to it lightly. "it's as if we had a secret between us," she explained,[pg 263] "the secret of the garden. besides, i shall always love it because it was there i first suspected that you—cared. when did you begin to care, peter?"
"since before i can remember. would you like to live in it?"
"in this palace? here in venice?"
"it's for rent," he told her; "the consul has it."
"but could we afford it?"
"well," said peter, "if you like it so much, at the rate things are here, we can pull it up by the roots and take it back to bloombury."
they lost themselves in absurd speculations as to the probable effect on the villagers of that, and so failed to take note as their gondola nosed into the green shadow under the consulate, of the merrythought's launch athwart the landing, until the captain himself hailed them.
"this port," he declared, "is under embargo. i have been waiting here since half tide and there's nothing doing. somebody's in there chewing red tape, but i don't calculate to let anybody else have a turn at it until i get my bit wound up an' tied in a knot. now don't tell me you've got business in there?"[pg 264]
"we want to find out something."
"well, when ye find it, it won't be what ye want," asserted the captain gloomily. "it never is in these dago countries." he motioned his own boat aside from the landing. "if ye want to go inside and set on a chair," he suggested, "i'll not hender ye. i like the water best myself. i hope your business will stand waiting."
"to everybody but ourselves," said peter. "you see," he caught the permission lightly from miss dassonville's eyes, "we want to get married."
"ho!" said the captain, chirking up. "i could 'a' told ye that the fust time i laid eyes on ye. but i'll tell ye this: ye can't do nothing in a hurry in this country. the only place where a man can do things up as soon as he thinks of 'em is on the blue water. we don't have red tape on shipboard, i can tell you. the skipper's the law and the government."
"could you marry people?"
"well, i ain't to say in the habit of it, but it's the law that i could."
"then if we get tangled up with the consul,"[pg 265] said peter, "we'll have to fall back on you," and they took it as an excellent piece of fooling which they were later to come back to as a matter of serious resort.
"of course," said the consul, "i could marry you and it would be legal if you chose to count it so at home, but if you are thinking of taking a house here and of making an extended residence i shouldn't advise it. as to captain dunham's suggestion, it's not wholly a bad one. not being in italy, the italians can't take exception to it, and if it is properly witnessed and recorded at home it ought to stand."
they couldn't of course take it in all at once that they were simply to sail out there into the ethereal blueness and to come back from it with the right to live together. however, it made for a great unanimity of opinion as they talked it over on the way home, that, since so much was lacking from peter's marriage that he had dreamed went to it, and so much more had come into savilla's than she had dared to imagine, it mattered very little what else was added or left out.[pg 266]
"i suppose," suggested miss dassonville, "mrs. merrithew will think it dreadful." but as it turned out mrs. merrithew thought very well of it.
"on a united states boat with a united states minister—there is one here i've found out—it seems a lot safer than to trust to these foreign ways. if you was to be married in italian i should never be certain you wouldn't wake up some morning and find yourself not married. and then how should i feel!" as to the palace plan, she threw herself into it with heavy alacrity. "i s'pose i've got to see you through," she said, "and it will give me something to think about. i don't suppose you have any intention that way, but an engaged couple isn't very good company."
it transpired that the merrythought would put out to the high seas on the twenty-second, and it was in the flutter of their practical adjustments to meet this date that peter found the ten days of his engagement move so swiftly; to engage servants, to interview tradespeople, to prune the neglected garden—it was savilla's notion that they should do this themselves—all[pg 267] the stir of domestic life made so many points of advantage to support him above that dryness of despair from which he had moments of feeling himself all too hardly rescued. he had come up out of it sufficiently by the help that italy afforded, to glimpse once more the country of his dreams, only by this act of his marriage to turn his back on it forever. savilla dassonville was a dear little thing; if it came to that, a revered and valued thing, but she was not, he had never pretended it, the lovely lady, and the door that shut them in as man and wife was to shut her forever out of his life. and yet though this was his accepted, his official position, it was remarkable even to himself how much less frequently as the preparations for his marriage went forward, he found himself obliged to fall back upon it; how much more he projected himself into his future as the adored and protecting male. he recalled in this connection that the princess had said to him that he should visit his house no more, and it was part of the proof of the notion he entertained toward himself as a man done with the imaginative life, that he accepted it with no more fuss[pg 268] about it. he had in fact his mind's eye on a piece of ground which lessing could buy for him, on the river, an hour from the city, where he could manage for savilla at least, a generous substitute for dreams, and a situation for himself for which he began to discover more appetite than he would have believed. it was likely, he thought, that he would himself take a turn at planning the garden.
it was very early in the morning when the wedding party which had been reinforced by the consul, the mistress of casa frolli, and the minister, who had turned out to be exactly of mrs. merrithew's persuasion, went aboard the merrythought, blooming out amazingly in bunting and roses for the occasion. the morning blueness had drained out from the city and stained the waters eastward as they put out between the red and yellow sails of the fishing fleet. they saw the cypress-towered islands of romance melt in the morning haze. the steam launch which was to take them ashore again ploughed alongside, and there was a pleasant sort of home smell from the cook's quarters.[pg 269]
peter sat forward with the bride's hand tucked under his arm and presently he heard her laughing softly, delightedly.
"peter, do you know what that is, that good smell i mean?"
"what do you think it is?"
"it's pie baking. truly, don't you think i'm enough of a housewife to know that?"
"i know you're everything you ought to be."
"it is pie, there's no doubt about it, but we must pretend to be awfully surprised when the captain brings it out. but peter, don't you like it?"
"pie, my dear?"
"no, but like having everything so homey and—and—so genuine at our wedding?"
"i hope," said peter, "it's genuine pie, but i see what you mean, my dear."
"it's an omen, almost, that we'll always have the good, comfortable, common things to fall back upon, if our marriage should not prove quite all we've dreamed it. it's been so perfect up to now; it must drop down out of the clouds some time."
it seemed rather to have taken a sweep upward[pg 270] 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.[pg 271]
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.[pg 272]
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.
