Part 28

Having thus satisfactorily disposed of that subject, the young people turned their steps toward the clock-tower, Geof wondering resignedly why May made no motion to rejoin her family.

"I don't think I agree with you about mysteries," she said, presently; "I can't bear them. There's Nanni, now, the brother of our gondolier," she continued; and then, turning, and looking her companion full in the face: "Can you make him out?"

"What is it about him that puzzles you?" Geof asked, returning her glance with equal frankness.

"I don't know that I can explain it. He seems somehow--different. There is something wrong about him. I don't think he is happy."

"And what if he is not?" said Geof tentatively. "There need be no mystery about that. I don't suppose many men are really happy."

"You don't?" May exclaimed, in naive surprise.

Geof, to whom happiness had come to seem almost incredible, since he had got a glimpse of what it might be, was himself rather taken aback at his own utterance.

"I rather think," he said, laughing uneasily, "that I only meant that not many people are superlatively happy. As for commonplace, every-day happiness, I suppose that depends upon temperament. Perhaps the man is of a melancholy temperament."

"Perhaps that is it," May answered, thoughtfully; and with one accord they turned into the quiet paved space north of San Marco, where they stood, a few moments, looking out into the brilliant Piazza.

"I suppose it was very silly of me," May went on, laying her hand upon the haunches of a great stone lion that crouches there, polished smooth with the passage of centuries; "but I had a notion that he was unhappy because he had to live in exile, a mere servant, you know, in a dreadful hospital in Milan. And so I went and offered to give him a gondola, and he wouldn't accept it. He was thanking me the other day, at Torcello, when you came up. I suppose that was why he was so--melodramatic," and she laughed a little forced laugh, and looked Geoffry straight in the face again.

He saw her embarrassment, and understood that she had been setting him right, and that it had cost her an effort to refer to the matter. And so he said the kindest thing possible under the circumstances.

"If you mean his kissing your hand," he replied, with an air of discussing a matter of no consequence, "there's nothing melodramatic in that, at least when a gondolier does it. It is the custom of their class. Old Pietro kisses mine and makes me feel like an ancient doge."

He could see that she was relieved.

"I wonder where the others are," she said. "Let us go and look them up. I didn't feel like anything so fine as a doge," she added, lightly, as they came out into the square again. "I felt like a very interfering and foolish kind of person. I don't think I shall do anything so silly again."

"There is nothing silly about a generous action," Geof protested, looking with great kindness at the young girl, to whom the garment of humility was not unbecoming. "I rather think, though, that the man is better off than you imagine. At any rate, I'm very sure he is better off for the goodwill you have shown him."

Then, with a return of his previous solicitude, somewhat stimulated by a new realisation of the unusual beauty of this experimenter in mysteries, he added:

"These Italians are impressionable fellows. They sometimes feel things more than we cold-blooded Northerners appreciate."

"Do they?" said May, in her most matter-of-fact voice, giving Geof a glance of quick intelligence, and putting herself instantly on the defensive; "I should have said it was rather touch and go with their feelings. Ah! There's Mr. Kenwick, pretending he doesn't see us!"

XIV

A Summer's Day

May had been quite correct in her surmise that Kenwick was shamming, though this was merely based on general theories. Not only did he see her as she emerged with Geoffry Daymond from the comparative obscurity of the stone lion's neighbourhood, but he had been for some moments furtively watching them both, himself lost to view in the crowd about the band-stand. She would have been surprised indeed if she could have guessed the effect upon the sprightly cavalier of this new evidence of the confidential relations existing between herself and his friend; and indeed, when a moment later he met them, with a facetious sally, it is doubtful whether anything short of clairvoyance could have divined his true state of mind.

For Oliver Kenwick was experiencing something as closely resembling genuine feeling as was like to befall him in the course of his discreetly regulated career. He had played with fire once too often, and he had discovered, not without a slight accession of self-respect, that he was perceptibly scorched. He had supposed his interest in May Beverly to be purely impersonal; he had been mistaken. He had admired her in his character of connoisseur, as a man of the world he had found amusement and relaxation in her society. For May had the unique advantage of combining that degree of conventionality which is admissibly essential, with a refreshing lack of conventionality in non-essentials. She had repeatedly surprised and stimulated him, she had never yet offended his taste. And Kenwick was nothing if not fastidious. Her attraction had been undeniably heightened by his imagined discovery of Geoffry Daymond's interest in her; but quite independently of that artificial stimulus, she did exercise a strong fascination over him.

It was not in Oliver Kenwick's scheme of life to sacrifice his independence to any claim, even to that of his own unchastened fancies. He would not have known himself in any other role than that of free-lance, and life would indeed have lost its savour if he had been betrayed into the purchase of an indulgence of feeling at the cost of his self-approval. He possessed an ideal of himself which he prized and guarded; if the ideal was a questionable one, judged by ordinary standards, he was at least consistent in its cultivation. If, impelled by a spirit of rivalry, if, goaded to something approaching rashness by the contemplation of Geof's quiet, masterful way of taking possession of the things he coveted, he resolved to retaliate where retaliation was peculiarly palatable, this indicated no change whatever in his ultimate intentions.

For a day or two after the little episode of the stone lion Kenwick succeeded in cutting Geof out, as he termed it, very neatly, by the simple device of interesting May in a certain sketch which she undertook at his suggestion. The subject was a common enough one in Venice; a tranquil rio between ruinous walls,--here, a bit of quaint mediaeval sculpture,--there, a splash of verdure over the arch of a gateway,--a pointed church tower in remote perspective. The clever craftsman found no difficulty in inventing reasons why a similar combination of advantages was not to be found elsewhere. In his own mind he was perfectly well aware that he chose it because the proper point of view was only to be obtained by disembarking and planting the easels on a bit of quay that stopped abruptly in front of a deserted house. Here, in this isolated position, the two painted together for three successive afternoons, and Kenwick, by dint of a judicious combination of encouragement and criticism, which he, as a practised artist had always at command, succeeded in arousing in the young girl an enthusiasm for the work, and an appreciation of his own mastery of his craft, which could not but be gratifying and stimulating to him. In truth she had never liked him so well, and, having on her part nothing to conceal, she was as outspoken in her gratitude as in all things else.

At the end of the third afternoon May had completed the best sketch she had ever done. Just as she was putting the finishing stroke to it, a gondola went gliding by, an old and shabby one, and in the tall figure at the stern she recognised Nanni. An indefinable shadow crept over the bright elation of a moment previous, and she stopped painting.

"That old tub of your Nanni's is about ready for the crematory," Kenwick observed, as he too began putting up his traps.

"The crematory?" she repeated, absently.

"Yes; when they are fairly on their last legs the gondolas are burnt in the glass-factories."