"Maybe; not for purposes of pleasure. Father, beautiful paintings and grand buildings are nothing to him; nothing at all; and music might be the tinkling of tin kettles for all the meaning he finds in it. Father, dear, do get me some customers!"
"You are a silly girl, Dolly!" said her father, breaking away, and not very well pleased. Neither did he bring her customers. Those were not the days of photographs. Dolly took to painting little bits of views in Venice; here a palace; there a bridge over a canal; the pillars with the dragon and St. Theodore, the Place of St. Mark, bits of the Riva with boats; she finished up these little pictures with great care and delicacy of execution, and then employed Rupert to dispose of them in the stationers' and fancy shops. He had some difficulty at first in finding the right market for her wares; however, he finally succeeded; and Dolly could sell as many pictures as she could paint. True, not for a great price; they did not pay so well as likenesses; but Dolly took what she could get, feeling very uncertain of supplies for a time that was coming. Mr. Copley certainly was not flush with his money now; and she did not flatter herself that his ways were mending.
Less and less did his wife and daughter see of his company.
"Rupert," said Dolly doubtfully, one day, "do you know where my father goes, so much of the time?"
"No," said Rupert; "that's just what I don't. But I can find out, easy."
Dolly did not say, Do; she did not say anything; she stood pondering and anxious by the window. Neither did Rupert ask further; he acted.
It came by degrees to be a pretty regular thing, that Mr. Copley spent the evening abroad, excused himself from going anywhere with his family, and when they did see him wore an uncertain, purposeless, vagrant sort of look and air. By degrees this began to strike even Mrs. Copley.
"I wish you would just make up your mind to marry Mr. St. Leger!" she said almost weepingly one day. "Then all would go right. I believe it would make me well, to begin with; and it would bring your father right back to his old self."
"How, mother?" Dolly said sadly.
"It would give him spirit at once. It is because he is out of spirits that he does so." (Mrs. Copley did not explain herself.) "I know, if he were once sure of seeing you Mrs. St. Leger, all would come right.
Lawrence would help him; he _could_ help him then."
"Who would help me?"
"Nonsense, Dolly! Who would help you choose your dresses and wear your diamonds; that is all the difficulty you would have. But all's going wrong!" said Mrs. Copley, sinking into tears; "and you are selfish, like everybody else, and think only of yourself."
Dolly bore this in silence. It startled her, however, greatly, to find her own view of things held by her much less sharp-sighted mother. She pondered on what was best to do. Should she sit still and quietly see her father lost irretrievably in the bad habits which were creeping upon him? But what step could she take? She asked herself this question evening after evening.
It was late one night, and Lawrence as well as her father had been out ever since dinner. Mrs. Copley, weary and dispirited, had gone to bed.
Dolly stood at the window looking out, not to see how the moonlight sparkled on the water and glanced on the vessels, but in a hopeless sort of expectancy watching for her father to come. The stream of passers-by had grown thin, and was growing thinner.
"Rupert," Dolly spoke after a long silence, "do you know where my father is?"
"Can't say I do. I could give a pretty fair guess, though, if you asked me."
"Could you take me to him?"
"Take you to him!" exclaimed the young man, starting.
"Can you find the way? Where is it?"
"I've been there often enough," said Rupert.
"What place is it?"
"The queerest place you ever saw. Do you recollect Mr. St. Leger telling us once about wine-shops in Venice? You and he were talking"----
"Yes, yes, I remember. Is it one of those? Not a cafe?"
"Not a cafe at all; neither a cafe nor a trattoria. Just a wine-shop.
Nothing in it but wine casks, and the mugs or jugs of white and blue crockery that they draw the wine into; it's the most ridiculous place altogether I ever was in. I haven't been in it now, that's a fact."
"What were you there for so often, then?"
"Well," said Rupert, "I was looking after things."
"Drink wine and eat nothing!" said Dolly again. "Are there many people there?"
"Well, you can eat if you have a mind to; there are folks enough to sell you things; though they don't belong to the establishment. They come in from the street, with ever so many sorts of things, directly they see a customer sit down; fish and oysters, and cakes and fruit.
But the shop sells nothing but wine. Mr. St. Leger says that is good."
"Not many people there?" Dolly asked again.
"No; not unless at a busy time. There won't be many there now, I guess."
"What makes you think my father is there?"
"I've seen him there pretty often," Rupert said in a low voice.
Dolly stood some minutes silent, thinking, and struggling with herself.
When she turned to Rupert at the end of those minutes, her air was quite composed and her voice was clear and calm.
"Can you take me there, Rupert? Can you find the way?"
"I know it as well as the way to my mouth. You see, I didn't know but maybe--I couldn't tell what you might take a notion to want me to do; so I just practised, till I had got the ins and outs of the thing. And there are a good many ins and outs, I can tell you. But I know them."
"Then we will go," said Dolly. "I'll be ready in two minutes."
It was a brilliant moonlight night, as I said. Venice, the bride of the Adriatic, lay as if robed in silver for her wedding. The air was soft, late as the time of year was; Dolly had no need of any but a light wrap to protect her in her midnight expedition. Rupert called a gondola, and presently they were gliding along, as still as ghosts, under the shadow of bridges, past glistening palace fronts, again in the deep shade of a wall of buildings. Wherever the light struck it was like molten silver; facades and carvings stood sharply revealed; every beauty of the weird city seemed heightened and spiritualised; almost glorified; while the silence, the outward peace, gave still more the impression of a place fair-like and unreal. It was truly a wonderful sail, a marvellous passage through an enchanted city, never to be forgotten by either of the two young people; who went for some distance in a silence as if a spell were upon them too.
At Dolly's age, with all its elasticity, some aspects of trouble are more overwhelming than in later years. When one has not measured life, not learned yet the relations and proportions of things, one imagines the whole earth darkened by the cloud which is but hiding the sun from the spot where our feet stand. And before one has seen what wonders Time can do, the ruin wrought by an avalanche or a flood seems irreparable. It is inconceivable, that the bare and torn rocks should be clothed again, the choking piles of rubbish ever be anything but dismal and unsightly, the stripped fields ever be green and flourishing, or the torn-up trees be ever replaced. Yet Time does it all. Come after a while to look again, and the traces of past devastation are not easy to find; nature's weaving has so covered, and nature's embroidery has so adorned, the bald places. In human life there is something like this often done; though, as I said, youth wots not of it and does not believe in it. So Dolly this night saw her little life a wilderness, which had been a garden of flowers. Some flowers might be lifting their heads yet, but what Dolly looked at was the destruction. Wrought by her own father's hand! I cannot tell how that thought stung and crushed Dolly. What would anything else in the world have mattered, so she could have kept him? help could have been found; but to lose _him_, her father, and not by death, but by change, by dishonour, by loss of his identity--Dolly felt indeed that a storm had come upon the little garden of her life from the sweeping ruin of which there could be no revival. She could hardly hold her head up for a long distance of that midnight sail; yet she did, and noted as they passed the fairy glories of the scene. Just noted them, to deepen, if possible, the pangs at her heart. All this beauty, all this outward delight, mocked the inner reality; and made sharp the sense of it with the contrast of what might have been. As they went along, Venice became to her fancy a grave and monument of lost things, which floated together in her mind's vision. Past struggles for freedom, beaten back or faded out; vanished patriotism and art, with their champions; extinct ambitions and powers; historical glories evaporated, as it were, leaving only a scent upon the air; what was left at Venice but monuments? and like it now her own little life gone out and gone down!
For so it seemed to Dolly. Even if she succeeded in her mission, and brought her father home, what safety, what security could she have? And if she did _not_ bring him--then all was lost indeed. It was lost anyhow, she thought, as far as her own life was concerned. Her father could not be what he had been again. "O father! my father!" was poor Dolly's bitter cry, "if you had taken anything else from me, and only left me yourself!"
After a long time, when she spoke to Rupert, it was in a quiet, unaltered voice.
"Is this the shortest way, Rupert?"
"As like as not it's the longest. But, you see, it's the only way I know. I've always got there starting from the Place of St. Mark; and that way I know what I am about; but though I daresay there's a short cut home, I've never been it, and don't know it."
Dolly added no more.
"It's a bit of a walk from St. Mark's," Rupert went on. "Do you mind?"
"No," said Dolly, sighing. "Rupert, I wish you were a Christian friend!
You are a good friend, but I wish you were a Christian!"
"Why just now?"
"Nobody else can give one comfort. You cannot, Rupert, with all the will in the world; there is no comfort in anything you could tell me. I have only one Christian friend on this side of the Atlantic; and that is Mrs. Jersey; and she might as well be in America too, where Aunt Hal is!"
Dolly was crying. It went to Rupert's heart.