"Yes. Well, perhaps, we take them out, or we go and sit in the garden.
I expect father will want us to go and sit in the garden and see the things he's planted; and mother of course'll consent, though she'll be longing to go out to the Piazza San Marco and look at the lace in the shops under the Arcade."
"Well, then, I'll go out with her----" said Jill.
"If you go, I go," said John.
She laughed, and forced him to a compromise. He would stay in the garden for half an hour; it need not be more.
"There might be things we wanted to buy in the shops," she said--"shops where you might not be allowed to come." So he could understand that it ought to be half an hour. But it must not be more.
"And then--what then?" she asked.
"Well, then, directly after lunch, we'd take a gondola once more and set off for Murano."
"Directly after? Wouldn't it be cruel to leave them so soon? If we only go for a month every year, wouldn't it be cruel?"
This is where a man is selfish. This is where a woman is kind. It was natural enough, but he had not thought so much of them.
He consented that they should stay till tea-time was over--tea in those little, wee cups without any handles, which the little old white-haired lady could just manage to grasp in her twisted hands, and accordingly, loved so much because they did not jeer at her powerlessness as did the many things which she had once been able to hold.
"You didn't want not to come out with me--did you?" he asked when the tea-time picture had passed before his eyes.
"Not--not want--but you'd get tired, perhaps, if you saw too much of me alone."
"Get tired!"
Three score years and ten were the utmost that a man might hope for in this life. Get tired!
Well, then, tea was over at last. The light of a pearl was creeping into the sky. That was the most wonderful time of all to cross the Lagoon to Murano.
"Then it was much better we stayed to tea," she whispered.
Much better, since the shadows were deepening under the arches, and he could take her head in his hands and kiss her--as he kissed her then--without being seen. Oh--it was much better that they had stayed to tea.
Now they had started, past the Chiesa San Giacomo into the Grand Canal, down the broad waterway, past the Ca' d'Oro, which the Contarini built, to the narrow Rio di Felice; then out into the Sacca della Misericordia, and there, before them, the broad stretch of the silent Lagoon--a lake of opal water that never ended, but as silently became the sky, with no line of light or shade to mark the alchemy of change.
"And across this," said John,--"with their hour glasses spilling out the sand, come the gondolas with the dead, to the cemetery that lies in the water in the midst of the Lagoon. They churn up the water with the speed they go, and if you ask a gondolier why they go so fast, he will tell you it is because the dead cannot pay for that last journey of theirs. That is their humour in the city they call _La citta del riso sangue_. But we shall creep through the water--we can pay--at least----" he thought of his two quarters' rent--"I suppose we can. We shall steer through the water like the shadow of a little cloud gliding across the sea. Oh----" he pressed his hands to his eyes--"but it would be wonderful there with you! And at night, when the whole city is full of darkness--strange, silent, mysterious darkness--where every lighted taper that burns and every lamp that is lit seems to illuminate a deed of mystery, we would go out into the Grand Canal, when we had said good-night to those dear old people of mine and we'd listen to them singing--and, oh,--they sing so badly, but it sounds so wonderful there.
At last--one by one, the lights would begin to flicker out. The windows that were alive and awake would close their eyes and hide in the mysterious darkness; a huge white lamp of a moon would glide up out of the breast of the Adriatic, and then----"
"Then?" she whispered.
"Then we should turn back to the little room amongst all those other little rooms in the great darkness--the gondolier would row home, and I should be left alone with my arms tight round you and my head resting on the gentlest place in the world."
He lifted his hands above his head--he laughed bitterly with the unreality of it all.
"What beautiful nonsense all this is," said he.
She looked up with the tears burning in her eyes. She looked up and her glance fell upon a picture that his father had painted and given him--a picture of the Rialto lifting with its white arches over the green water. She pointed to it. He followed with his eyes the white line of her finger.
"Then that," said Jill, and her voice quivered--"that's the City--the City of Beautiful Nonsense."
BOOK II
THE TUNNEL
CHAPTER XXII
THE HEART OF THE SHADOW
Ideals in the human being are as the flight of a swallow, now high, now sinking to earth, borne upwards by the bright light of air, pressed downwards by the lowering of a heavy sky.
When John had said his last good-bye to Jill, when it seemed to both of them that the Romance was finished--when the City of Beautiful Nonsense had just been seen upon the horizon, like a land of promise viewed from a height of Pisgah, and then faded into the mist of impossible things, John turned back to those rooms in Fetter Lane, with his ideal hugging close to earth and all the loneliness of life stretching out monotonously before him.
But not until he had seen the empty tea-cups in their position upon the table just as they had left them, the little piece of bread and butter she had half eaten, upon her plate; not until he had seen the empty chairs standing closely together as though repeating in whispers all the story of the City of Beautiful Nonsense which he had told her, did he come actually to realise that he had lost her--that he was alone.
The minutes ticked wearily by as he sat there, staring at it all as though it were an empty stage at the end of a play, which the players had deserted.
At the sound of footsteps mounting the stairs, he looked up. Then, as a knock fell upon the door, he started to his feet. She had come back!
She could bear the parting no more than he! They were never to be parted! This loneliness was too unendurable, too awful to bear. In hurried strides, he reached the door and flung it open.
There stood the little bailiff--_the great_ Mr. Chesterton--with a smile spreading agreeably over his solemn face. In those two hours of his absence, he had thought of three clever things--three! which, having just invented, he found to be in every way as good as that famous simile of Time and Tide. He was longing to say them.
But when he saw the look on John's face, he stopped.
"Yer not expecting another young lady are yer?" he asked.
John turned back despairingly into the room, making way for him to enter. He offered no reply to the little man's remark.
Mr. Chesterton closed the door behind him.
"'Ave you 'ad a scrap?" he asked sympathetically.
Now, sympathy from a bailiff, may be a very beautiful thing, but when the mind of a man is floundering in the nethermost pit, he has no need of it. John turned on him, his face changed, his whole expression altered.
"You've come here to do your work, haven't you?" he said thickly--"you've come here to take possession of any confounded thing you like. Well--take it! Take the whole blessed show! I don't want to see a single thing in this room again." He strode to the door. The little man stood staring at him amazed. "You can rip every damned thing off the walls----" he went on wildly. "Make up your fifteen pounds whatever you do. Don't stint yourself! For God's sake don't stint yourself!--Take every damned thing!"
The door slammed. He was gone.
It was half-past six. Payne and Welcome were just beginning to put up their shutters. John hurried into the side entrance and threw his ticket down on the counter.
"I want that seventeen pounds," he said, and the ten-shilling-piece twisted a giddy dance on the counter by the side of the ticket, then sank down with a gentle ringing sound.