by Ouida
It was twelve o’clock when, into the empty brilliantly lighted room, Adrianis entered and came across it to where Damer sat on the balcony.
“I have found her!” he said, with joyous triumph. The moonlight shone on his dark, starry eyes, his laughing mouth, his tall figure, full of grace and strength like the form of the Greek Hermes in the Vatican.
Damer laid aside his papers with impatience.
“And she has welcomed you, apparently? It is midnight, and you look victorious.”
Adrianis made a gesture of vexed protestation.
“Pray do not suspect such things. I sent in my card and begged her major-domo to say that I had found her necklace.
She sent word for me to go upstairs that she might thank me. Of course my name was known to her. She had a duenna with her. It was all solemn and correct. She was enchanted to find her necklace. It was an heirloom which Zaranegra gave her. He was killed in a duel, as I told you, two years ago. She is very beautiful and looks twenty years old, even less. I was very honest; I told her that an Englishman who was travelling with me had enjoyed the honour of finding the opals; and she wishes to see you to-morrow. I promised to take you in prima sera; you surely ought to be grateful.”
Damer shrugged his shoulders and looked regretfully at his papers and pencils.
“Women only disturb one,” he said, ungraciously.
Adrianis laughed.
“It is that disturbance which perfumes our life and shakes the rose leaves over it. But I remember, to attract you a woman must be lying, dead or alive, on an operating-table.”
“Alive by preference,’ said Damer. “The dead are little use to us; their nervous system is still, like a stopped clock.”
“A creature must suffer to interest you?”
“Certainly.”
Adrianis shuddered slightly.
“Why did you save me?”
Damer smiled.
“My dear prince, it is my duty to save when I can. I should have preferred to let you alone, and study your natural powers of resistance in conflict with the destruction which was menacing them. But I could not follow my preferences. I was called in to assist your natural powers by affording them artificial resistance; and I was bound to do so.”
Adrianis made a grimace which signified disappointment and distaste.
“If my mother knew you looked at it in that way she would not adore you, my friend, as she does.”
“The princess exaggerates,” said Damer, putting out his lamp. “Mothers always do; I do not think I ever said anything to lead her to deceive herself with regard to me. She knows what my interests and my pursuits are.”
“But,” said Adrianis, wistfully, “surely there are many men of science, many surgeons, whose desire is to console, to amend, who care for the poor human material on which they work?”
“There are some,” replied Damer; “but they are not in the front ranks of their profession, nor will science ever owe much to them.”
The young man was silent; he felt in his moral nature as he had sometimes felt in his physical, when a chill icy wind had risen and passed through the sunshine of a balmy day. He shook off the impression with the mutability of a happy temper.
“Eh via!” he cried. “You make me feel cold in the marrow of my bones. Good-night. I am tired, and I go to dream of the lady of the opals. Like you, I prefer living women to dead ones, but I do not wish them to suffer. I wish them to enjoy — for my sake and their own!”
Damer, left alone, relit his lamp, took up his papers and books, went into the room, for the night was fresh, and remained reading and writing until daybreak.
VI.
VERONICA ZARANEGRA was charmed to find her necklace; she was still more charmed to find an adventure through it.
This beautiful youth with his starry eyes, soft with admiration, who had brought her back the opals, looked like a knight out of fairyland. She was young; she was weary of the seclusion of her widowhood; she was kept in close constraint by those who had authority over her; she was ready to re-enter life in its enjoyments, its amusements, its affections, its desires.
The tragic end of her husband had impressed and saddened her, but she had recovered from its shock. The marriage had been arranged by their respective families, and the hearts of neither had been consulted. Zaranegra, however, had become much in love with her, and had left her all which it was in his power to leave, and that had been much.
She was like a picture of Caterina Cornaro as she stood on the balcony of her house; her golden hair was enclosed in a pearl-sown net, she had some crimson carnations at her throat, and her cloak of red satin lined with sables lay on her shoulders and fell to her feet like the robes of a Dogaressa.
The balcony was filled with spiræa, whose white blossoms were like snow about her in the starlight and lamplight as the gondola which brought the Sicilian prince and his companion to her palace paused below at the water-stairs.
“How clever it was of you to see my opals under the grass and the sand!” she said, a few moments later, as Adrianis presented Damer in the long, dim room hung with tapestries and rich in bronzes, marbles, pictures, and mosaics.
She threw her cloak on a couch as she spoke; she was dressed in black, but the gauze sleeves of the gown showed her fair arms, and the bodice was slightly open on her bosom; her face was bright like a rose above the deep shadow of the gown; her hair had been a little ruffled by the wind of the evening as she had stood on the balcony.
“Madame,” said Damer, as he bowed to her with a strange and unwelcome sense of embarrassment, “Prince Adrianis should not have told you that I had such good fortune. I am no fit squire of dames: he is.”
“But how came you to see them, all dull and muddy as they were?”
“Sight is a matter of training; I use my eyes. Most people do not use theirs.”
She looked at him curiously and laughed. The answer seemed to her very droll.
“Everybody sees except the blind,” she said, somewhat puzzled.
“And the purblind,” added Damer.
She did not catch his meaning. She turned from him a little impatiently and addressed Adrianis.
She spoke of music. Adrianis was accomplished in that art; there was a mandoline lying on the grand piano; he took it up and sang to it a Sicilian love-song; she took it from him and sang Venetian barcarolle and stornelli; then they sang together, and their clear, youthful voices blent melodiously. People passing on the canal stopped their gondolas under the balcony to listen; some Venetian professsional musicians in a boat below applauded. Damer sat in the shadow, and listened, and looked at them. Music said little or nothing to him; he had scarcely any comprehension of it; but something in the sound of those blended voices touched a chord in his nature; made him feel vaguely sad, restlessly desirous, foolishly irritated.
The light fell on the handsome head of the youth, on the carnations at the lady’s throat, on the rings on their hands, which touched as they took the mandoline one from the other; behind them were the open casement, the balcony with its white flowers, the lighted frontage of a palace on the opposite side of the canal.
As they ceased to sing the people below on the water applauded again, and cried, “Brava! brava! Bis, his!”
Adrianis laughed and rose, and, going out on to the balcony, threw some money to the boatload of ambulant musicians who had left off their playing and singing to listen.
“Those artists below are very kind to us amateurs,” said Adrianis, with a little branch of spiraea in his hand, which he proceeded to fasten in his button-hole as he came back into the light of the room.
“You are more than an amateur.”
“Oh, all Sicilians sing. The syrens teach us.”
“Prince Adrianis is a poet,” said Damer, with a harsh tone in his voice.
“Who never wrote a verse,” said Adrianis, as he handed a cup of coffee to his hostess.
“Shut the windows,” said the Countess Zaranegra to her servants, who
brought on coffee and wine, lemonade and syrups.
Through the closed windows the sound of a chorus sung by the strolling singers below came faintly and muffled into the room; the lamplight shone on the white spray of the spiraea in his coat, which looked like a crystal of snow.
“If I had found the opals I should have been inspired by them,” he added. “As it is, I am dumb and unhappy.”
Veronica Zaranegra smiled.
“If you are dumb, so was Orpheus.”
“And if you are unhappy so was Prince Fortunatus,” added Damer. “You are only sad out of wantonness because the gods have given you too many gifts.”
“Or because he has stolen a piece of spiraea.”
“I may keep my theft?” asked Adrianis.
“Yes. For you brought back the opals, though you did not find them.”
Soon after they both took their leave of her and went down to the waiting gondola. The boatload of musicians had drifted upwards towards Rialto, the colours of their paper lanthorns glowing through the dark. There was no moon. They did not speak to each other in the few minutes which carried them to their hotel. When they reached it they parted with a brief goodnight. Neither asked the other what his impressions of the lady, and of the evening, had been.
The night was dark. Mists obscured the stars. The lights at the Dogana and of the lamps along the Schiavone were shining brightly, and many other lights gleamed here and there, where they shone in gondolas, or boats, or at the mast-heads of vessels anchored in the dock of St. Mark. The hour was still early; eleven o’clock and the canal was not yet deserted. There was the liquid sound of parting water as people went to and fro on its surface. At such an hour Venice is still what it was in the days of Paul Veronese, or of Virginia di Leyva.
Adrianis sat by the sea-wall of the hotel garden and looked absently down the dark expanse studded with lights like diamonds, and thought exclusively of the woman he had quitted. He saw her golden hair shining in the lamplight, the red of the knot of carnations at her throat, the slender, jewelled hand on the mandoline, the smiling, rose-like mouth; he heard the clear, fresh, unstrained voice rising and falling with his own, whilst her eyes smiled and her eyes met his.
“Stones of sorrow! stones of sorrow!” he thought. “No, no. They shall be jewels of joy to me, to her. Love is born of a glance, of a note, of a murmur. It is the wonder flower of life. It blossoms full-grown in an instant.
It needs neither time nor reflection.”
His heart beat gladly in him: his nerves were thrilled and throbbing; his welcome of a new and profound emotion was without fear.
In such a mood the merest trifle has eloquence. He was sorry when he looked down on the spray of spiraea in his coat, and saw that all the little starry flowers of it had fallen off, and vanished, as though it had indeed been snow which had melted at a breath of scirocco.
VII.
TWO weeks passed, and brought the month of May. On the many island banks long sprays of dog-rose and honeysuckle hung down over the water, and the narrow canals which ran through them were tunnels of blossom and verdure; on the sunny shallows thousands of white-winged gulls were fishing and bathing all the day long; and in the churches azaleas and lilies and arums were grouped round the altars under the darkwinged angels of Tintoretto and the golden-haired cherubim of Tiepolo.
The nights were still cold but the days were warm, were at noontide even hot; and Veronica Zaranegra passed almost all her time on the water. There was a little orchard island which belonged to the family, out beyond Mazzorbo; in the previous century a small summerhouse or pavilion, with a red-tiled dome like a beehive, had been erected on it and was still there; a pretty toy still, though its frescoed walls were faded and its marble landing steps eaten away by the incessant washing of the sea; it was embowered in peach and plum and pear trees, and looked westward. Here she came often for breakfast, or for afternoon tea, or the evening merenda of fruit sweetmeats and wine, and here she was often accompanied by a gay party of Venetians of her own years and by the two strangers who had given her back her opals. The weather was rainless and radiant; the gondolas glided like swallows over the lagoons; she was rich, childlike, fond of pleasure; she tried to bring back the life of the eighteenth century, and amused herself with reviving its customs, its costumes, its comedies, as they had been before the storms of revolution and the smoke of war had rolled over the Alps, and Arcole and Marengo had silenced the laughter of Italy.
“I wish I had lived when this collar was new,” she said, when her jewellers returned to her the opals restored to their pristine brilliancy. “Life in Venice was one long festa then; I have read of it. It was all masque, and serenade, and courtship, and magnificence. People were not philosophical about life then; they lived. Nina Zaranegra was a beautiful woman. They have her portrait in the Belle Arte. She holds a rose to her lips and laughs. She was killed by her husband for an amour. She had these opals on her throat when he drove the stiletto through it. At least so Carlo used to tell me. But perhaps it was not true.”
“Do not wear them,” said Adrianis, to whom she was speaking. “Do not wear them if they are blood-stained. You know they are stones of sorrow.”
She laughed.
“You Sicilians are superstitious. We northerners are not. I like to wear them for that very reason of their tragedy.”
She took up the necklace and clasped it round her throat; some tendrils of her hair caught in the clasp; she gave an involuntary little cry of pain. Adrianis hastened to release her hair from the clasp. His hand trembled; their eyes met, and said much to each other. Damer, who was near, drew nearer.
“I have seen the portrait in the Belle Arte,” he said. “The Countess Nina symbolises silence with her rose, but she has the face of a woman who would not keep even her own secrets. Indeed a charming woman is always ‘bavarde comme les pies,’ as the French say.”
“You despise women,” said Veronica Zaranegra, with vexation.
“Oh, no. But I should not give them my confidence any more than I should give a delicate scientific instrument to a child.”
“Not even to a woman whom you loved?”
“Still less to a woman whom I loved.”
“You are a mysterious sage,” she said, a little impatiently. “You regard us as if we were children indeed, incapable of any comprehension.”
Damer did not dispute the accusation.
“Did I hear you say,” he asked, “that the lovely original of that portrait was murdered by her husband?”
“Yes, and he would not even allow her Christian burial, but had her body carried out on to the Orfano canal, and thrown into the water, with a great stone tied to her feet.”
“He was primitive,” said Damer. “Those are rough, rude ways of vengeance.”
“What would you have done?”
“I hardly know; but I should not have so stupidly wasted such a beautiful organism. Besides the end was too swift to be any great punishment.”
She was silent, looking at him with that mixture of curiosity, interest, and vague apprehension which he always aroused in her. She was not very intelligent, but she had quick susceptibilities; there was that in him which alarmed them and yet fascinated them.
“He awes me,” she said later in the day to Adrianis. “So often one cannot follow his meaning, but one always feels his reserve of power.”
It was a grave speech for a light-hearted lover of pleasure. Adrianis heard it with vexation, but he was loyal to the man who, as he considered, had saved his life.
“He is a person of great intellect,” he answered; “we are pigmies beside him. But—”
“But what?”
“He used his brains to cure my body. So I must not dispute the virtue of his use of them. Yet sometimes I fancy that he has no heart. I think all the forces in him have only nourished his mind, which is immense. But his heart, perhaps, has withered away, getting no nourishment. He would say I talk nonsense; but I think you will understand what I mean.”
“I think I understand,” said Veronica, thoughtfully.
She had thought very little in her careless young life; she had begun to think more since these two men had come into it.
“Adrianis merits better treatment than you give him,” said her duenna to her that day.
“How long will you keep him in suspense? You ought to remember ‘what hell it is in waiting to abide.’”
“A hell?” said Veronica, with the colour in her face. “You mean a paradise!”
“A fool’s paradise, I fear,” replied the elder woman. “And what does that other man do here? He told me he was due at some university in Germany.”
“How can I tell why either of them stays?” said Veronica, disingenuously as her conscience told her. “Venice allures many people, especially in her spring season.”
“So does a woman in her spring,” said the elder lady, drily, with an impatient gesture.
“You are angry with me,” said Veronica, mournfully.
“No, my dear. It is as useless to be angry with you as to be angry with a young cat because in its gambols it breaks a vase of which it knows nothing of the preciousness.”
Veronica Zaranegra did not resent or reply. She knew the vase was precious; she did not mean to break it; but she wanted to be free awhile longer. Mutual love was sweet, but it was not freedom. And what she felt ashamed of was a certain reluctance which moved her to allow Damer to see or know that she loved a man of so little intellectual force as Adrianis, a man who had nothing but his physical beauty and his gay, glad temper and kind heart.