Lucinda

In spite of my “facilities” – I had them again, and certainly this time Lady Dundrannan, if she knew my errand, would not have offered to secure them – my journey was slow, and interrupted at one point by a railway strike. When I arrived at my hotel on the Grand Canal – Arsenio’s palazzo was just round the corner by water, to be reached by land through a short but tortuous network of alleys with a little high stone bridge to finish up the approach to its back door – a telegram had been waiting forty-eight hours for me, forwarded from Cragsfoot by way of Paris. In it Waldo told me of Aunt Bertha’s death; influenza had swooped down on the weakened old body, and after three days’ illness made an end. It was hopeless to think of getting back in time for the funeral; I could have done it from Paris; I could not from Venice. I despatched the proper reply, and went out to the Piazza. My mind was for the moment switched off from what I had come about; but I thought more about Sir Paget than about poor old Aunt Bertha herself. He would be very lonely. Would Briarmount allay his loneliness?

It was about eleven o’clock on a bright sunny morning. They were clearing away the protective structures that had been erected round the buildings – St. Mark’s, the Ducal Palace, the new Campanile. I sat in a chair outside Florian’s and watched. There on that fine morning the war seemed somehow just a bad dream – or, rather, a play that had been played and was finished; a tragedy on which the curtain had fallen. See, they were clearing away the properties, and turning to real ordinary life again. So, for a space, it seemed to a man seduced by beauty into forgetfulness.

They came and went, men, women and children, all on their business and their recreations; there were soldiers too in abundance, some draggled, dirty, almost in rags, some tidy, trim and new, but all with a subtle air of something finished, a job done, comparative liberty at least secured; even the prisoners – several gangs of them were marched by – had that same air of release about them. Hawkers plied their wares – women mostly, a few old men and young boys; baskets were thrust under my nose; I motioned them away impatiently. I had traveled all night, and uncomfortably, with little sleep. Here was peace; I wanted peace; I was drowsy.

Thus, half as though in a dream, half as if it were an answer to what my mood demanded, – beauty back into the world, that was it – she came across the Piazza towards the place where I sat. Others sat there too – a row of them on my left hand; I had taken a chair rather apart, at the end of the row. She wore the little black frock – the one she had worn at Ste. Maxime, the one Godfrey had seen her in at Cimiez, or the fellow of it. On her left arm hung an open basket; it was full of fine needlework. I saw her take out the pieces, unfold them, wave them in the air. She found customers; distant echoes of chaff and chaffering reached my ears. From chair to chair she passed, coming nearer to me always.

I had upon me at this moment no surprise at seeing her, no wonder why she, wife of the now opulent Don Arsenio Valdez, was hawking fine needlework on the Piazza. The speculation as to the state of affairs, with which my mind had been so insatiably busy, did not now occupy it. I was just boyishly wrapped up in the anticipation of the joke that was going to happen – that must happen unless – horrible thought! – she sold out all her stock before she got to me. But no! She smiled and joked, but she stood out for her price. The basket would hold out – surely it would! – As she came near, I turned my head away – absorbed in the contemplation of St. Mark’s – just of St. Mark’s!

I felt her by me before she spoke. Then I heard, “Julius!” and a little gurgle of laughter. I turned my head with an answering laugh; her eyes were looking down at my face with their old misty wonder.

“You here! I can’t sit down by you here. I’ll walk across the Piazzetta, along to the quay. Follow me in a minute. Don’t lose sight of me!”

“I don’t propose to do that,” I whispered back, as she swung away from me. I paid my account, and followed her some fifty yards behind. I did not overtake her till we were at the Danieli Hotel. “Where shall we go to talk?” I asked.

“Once or twice I’ve done good business on the Lido. There’s a boat just going to start. Shall we go on board, Julius?”

I agreed eagerly and followed her on to the little boat. She set me down in the bows, went off with her basket, and presently came back without it. “I’ve left it with the captain,” she explained; “he knows me already, and will take care of it for me. No more work to-day, since you’ve come! And you must give me lunch, as you used to at Ste. Maxime. Somewhere very humble, because I’m in my working clothes.” She indicated the black frock, and the black shawl which she wore over her fair hair, after the fashion of the Venetian girls; I was myself in an uncommonly shabby suit of pre-war tweeds; we matched well enough so far as gentility was concerned. I studied her face. It had grown older, rather sharper in outline, though not lined or worn. And it still preserved its serenity; she still seemed to look out on this troublesome world, with all its experiences and vicissitudes, from somewhere else, from an inner sanctum in which she dwelt and from which no one could wholly draw her forth.

“How long have you been here?” I asked her, as the little steamboat sped on its short passage across to the Lido.

“Oh, about a fortnight or three weeks. I like it, and I got work at once. I’d rather sew than sell, but they sew so well here! And they tell me I sell so well. So selling it mainly is!”

“Then you came before the – the result of the lottery?”

“Oh, you’ve heard about the lottery, have you? From Arsenio, or – ?”

“No. I just saw it in the papers.”

The mention of the lottery seemed to afford her fresh amusement, but she said nothing more about it at the moment. “You see, I wanted to come away from the Riviera – never mind why!”

“I believe I know why!”

“How can you? If you’ve not heard from Arsenio!”

“I’ve been in Paris – and there I saw Godfrey Frost.”

“Oh!” The exclamation was long drawn out; it seemed to recognize that my having seen Godfrey Frost might explain a good deal of knowledge on my part. But she went on with her explanation. “Since the air raids have stopped, Arsenio has managed to let one floor of the palazzo– the piano nóbile; and I suggested to him that I might come and live on the top floor. I’d saved enough money for the journey, and I pay Arsenio rent. I’m entirely independent.”

“As you were at Ste. Maxime – and at Nice – or Cimiez?”

“I believe you do know all about it!”

“Shall I mention a certain blue frock?”

She flushed – for her, quite brightly – and slowly nodded her head. Then she sat silent till we reached the Lido, and had disembarked. Now she seemed unwilling to talk more of her affairs; she preferred to question me on mine. I told her of Aunt Bertha’s death.

“Ah, she liked me once. Poor Sir Paget!” was her only comment. “I think he likes you still,” I suggested. She shook her head doubtfully, and insisted on hearing about what I had been doing in Paris.

It was not till after we had lunched and were sitting drinking our coffee – just as in old days at Ste. Maxime – that I brought her back to her own affairs – to the present position.

“And you’re alone here – on the top floor of the palazzo?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, smiling. “Alone – alone on the top floor. I came here alone; we had had a quarrel over – over what we’ll call the blue frock. Arsenio promised not to follow me here unless I gave him leave – which I told him I never should do. ‘Oh, yes, you will some day,’ he said; but he gave me the promise. Oh, well, a promise from him! What is it? Of course he’s broken it. He arrived here the day before yesterday. He’s now at the palazzo– on the floor below mine. It’s just like Arsenio, isn’t it?”

She spoke of him with a sharper bitterness than she had ever shown at Ste. Maxime, though the old amusement at him was not entirely obscured by it. Her tone made me – in spite of everything – feel rather sorry for him. The dream of his life – was it to come only half true? Was the half that had come true to have no power to bring the other half with it? However little one might wish him success, or he deserve it, one pang of pity for him was inevitable.

“Well, perhaps he had some excuse,” I suggested. “He was naturally – well, elated. That wonderful piece of luck, you know!”

“Oh, that!” she murmured contemptuously – really as if winning three million francs, on a million to one chance or something like it, was nothing at all to make a fuss about! And that to a man who had spent years of his life, and certainly sacrificed any decency and self-respect that he possessed, in an apparently insane effort to do it.

Her profile was turned to me now; she was looking over the sands towards the Adriatic. I watched her face as I went. “And he won on his favorite number! On twenty-one, three times repeated! That must have seemed to him – ” There was no sign of emotion on her face. “Well, he called it your number, didn’t he?”

She knew what I meant, and she turned to me. But now she did not flush like a girl just out of the schoolroom. There was no change of color, no softening of her face such as the flush must have brought with it.

“You’re speaking of a dead thing,” she told me in a low calm voice. “Of a thing that is at last quite dead.”

“It died hard, Lucinda.”

“Yes, it lived through a great deal; it lived long enough – obstinately enough – to do sore wrong to – to other people, – better people than either Arsenio or me; long enough to make me do bad things – and suffer them. But now it’s dead. He’s killed it at last.”

At the moment I found nothing to say. Of course I was glad – no use in denying that. Yet it was grievous in its way. The thing was dead – the thing that so long, through so much, had bound her to Arsenio Valdez. The thing which had begun with the kiss in the garden at Cragsfoot, years ago, was finished.

“He put me to utter shame; he made me eat dirt,” she whispered with a sudden note of passion in her voice. She laid her arm on mine, and rose from her chair. “It spoils my meeting with you to think of it. Come back; I can do some work before it’s dark, and you can go and see him – he’ll be at the palazzo. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be friends with him still.”

“I don’t quite know about that,” I observed cautiously.

“I’m willing enough to be friendly with him, for that matter. But that’s – that’s not enough. Come along, we shall just about catch a boat, I think.”

We began to walk along to the quay where we were to embark.

“So he says he’s going to kill himself!” Lucinda added with a scornful laugh.

CHAPTER XIX

VIEWS AND WHIMS

SUCH, then, was Lucinda’s state of mind with regard to the matter. Her encounter with Nina at Cimiez had opened her eyes; after that, no evasions or lies from Arsenio could avail to blind her. The keys of the fort had been sold behind her back. The one thing that she had preserved and cherished out of the wreck of her fortunes, out of the sordid tragedy of her relations with her husband, had been filched from her; her proud and fastidious independence had been bartered; Arsenio had sold it; Nina Dundrannan had bought it. It was in effect that wearing of Nina’s cast-off frocks which, long ago at Ste. Maxime, she had pictured, with a smile, as an inconceivable emblem of humiliation. Arsenio had brought her to it, tricked her into it by his “presents” out of his “winnings.”

A point of sentiment? Precisely – and entirely; of a sentiment rooted deep in the nature of the two women, and deep in the history of their lives, in the rivalry and clash that there had been between them and between their destinies. The affair of the blue frock (to sum up the offense under that nickname – there had probably been other “presents”) might be regarded as merely the climax of the indignities which Arsenio had brought upon her – the proverbial last straw. To her it was different in kind from all the rest. In her midinette’s frock, in her Venetian shawl, she could make or sell her needlework contentedly; if on that score Nina felt exultation and dealt out scorn, Nina was wrong; nay, Nina was vulgar, and therefore a proper object for the laughter which had amazed and impressed Godfrey Frost. But she had been made Nina’s dependent, the object of her triumphant contemptuous bounty. That was iron entering her soul, a sharp point piercing to the very heart of it. This deadly stroke at her pride was fatal also to the last of her tenderness for Arsenio. The old tie between them – once so strong, so imperious, surviving so much – was finally broken. She was willing to be friendly – if friendliness can co-exist with undisguised resentment, with a sense of outrage bitter as death itself. But, in truth, how could it?

That same afternoon I made my way to the palazzo, rather a gloomy, ruinous-looking old building, on a narrow side canal, facing across it on to the heavy blank bulk of a convent. This, then, was the scene of “Venice,” of the old romance. To this they had come back – not indeed quite in the manner that I had imagined their return in my musings at Paris, but still, I could not doubt, on his part at least with something of the idea and the impulse which my fancy had attributed to him. How was he now finding – and facing – the situation as it stood?

I climbed up the stone staircase – past the piano nóbile, now let, as I had learnt, past another apartment al secondo– to the third floor. There I knocked. The door was opened by a small wizened man, dressed in seedy black. He looked like a waiter or a valet, run to seed. I asked for Valdez. Yes, Monsieur was in, and would no doubt see Monsieur. He himself was Monsieur Valdez’s servant – might he take my hat and stick? He talked while he did it; he had come with Monsieur from the Riviera – from Nice; he had been – er – in the same business establishment with Monsieur at Nice before – before Monsieur’s great coup. In fact – here he smiled proudly and detained me in the passage, laying one grimy finger on my arm – Monsieur considered him a mascot; it was from him that Monsieur had purchased ticket 212,121. Imagine that! “A pity you didn’t keep it!” said I. He just shrugged his shoulders, a weary smile acquiescing in that bit of bad luck. “However, Monsieur is very good to me,” he ended as he – at last – opened an inner door. Apparently Monsieur’s wonderful luck gave him a sort of divinity in a fellow-gambler’s eyes.

I found myself in a long narrow room, with three windows facing on the canal and the convent. The furniture was sparse, and looked old and rickety, but it had the remains of elegance; only a small rug or two mitigated the severity of the stone floor; one could see by dirty marks where pictures had once hung on the walls, but they hung there no more; altogether a depressing apartment.

Arsenio Valdez was sitting at a big bureau between two of the windows, with his back towards the door. He turned round a dreary-looking face as he heard my entrance. But the moment he saw who I was, he sprang up and greeted me warmly, with evident pleasure. He even held my hand while I accounted for my presence as best I could. I had a holiday, I thought that perhaps the change in his fortunes would bring him back to Venice, and I couldn’t resist the chance of congratulating him. I tried to make a joke of the whole business, and ended by squeezing his hand and felicitating him anew on his magnificent luck. “It took my breath away when I read it in the papers,” I said.

“Oh, but I knew, I knew!” he declared, as he led me to where a couple of armchairs were placed by a small table in the third window, and made me sit down. “It was a question of time, only of time. If I could keep afloat, it was bound to come! That was what nobody would believe. People are so queer! And when Louis, that poor little chap who showed you in, offered me the ticket – he worked at that little den in Nice – when he offered me that ticket – well, it was growing dark, and I had to spell out the figures one by one – two one, two one, two one! You see! There it was. I was as certain as if I had the prize in my pocket. Hard luck on him? No – he’d never have won with it – though the little fool may think he would. That number would never have won except for me. It was my number – and again my number – and once again!”

He poured this out in a torrent of excited triumph, every bit of him from top to toe full of movement and animation. It was a great vindication of himself, of his faith, that he was putting before the skeptic’s eyes. He stood justified by it in all that he had done and suffered, in all that he had asked others to do and to endure. He was more than justified. It was a glorification of him, Arsenio Valdez, who had never doubted or faltered, who had pursued Fortune for years, unwearied, undaunted. He had caught her by the mantle at last. Voilà! He ended with a last tumultuous waving of both his hands.

“Well, you’re entitled to your crow, old chap,” I said, “even if it doesn’t alter the fact that you were a damned fool.”

“Ah, you never had any poetry, romance, imagination in you!” he retorted, now with his old mocking smile. “You haven’t got it, you Rillingtons – neither you, nor yet Waldo. That was why I – ” He stopped, looking monkeyish.

“Why Twenty-one became your lucky number? Exactly; I remember the day very well myself. By the way, I ought to tell you that I’ve already seen Lucinda.”

He listened to a brief account of our meeting and excursion in silence, seeming to watch my face keenly. “You and she have always been very good friends,” he remarked thoughtfully at the end. He seemed to be considering – perhaps whether to take me into his confidence, to consult me. I did not, of course, feel entitled – or inclined! – to tell him of the confidences that Lucinda had reposed in me.

“Meanwhile,” I observed, “beyond acquiring a manservant – ”

“Louis? Oh, well, I should have been a fool not to keep him about me, shouldn’t I?”

“Yes! Didn’t Roman Generals at their triumphs carry a slave along, whose business it was to remind them that they were mortal? If you look at the unfortunate Louis from that point of view – ”

“That fellow will bring me luck again,” he asserted positively and seriously.

“Rot! What I was going to say was that you don’t seem to have launched out much on the strength of your three millions.” I cast a glance round the faded room.

He jerked his head towards the big bureau at which I had found him seated. “The money’s all in there. I haven’t touched a penny of it. I shan’t – just yet.” Again he was watching me; he was, I think, wondering how much Lucinda had said to me. “I’ve got a tenant for the first floor, and get along on the rent of that. And Lucinda – ” He gave what may be called an experimental smile, a silent “feeler” – “Well, she persists in her whim, as you’ve seen. Whatever may be said of it down at Nice, it’s purely a whim now, isn’t it?”

“Whims are powerful things with women,” I remarked. And platitudes are often useful conversational refuges.

He sat frowning for a minute, with the weary baffled air that his face had worn before he caught sight of me. “Perhaps you don’t care for such a short let, but, if it suits you, I’ll take the second floor for a month certain,” I continued.

In an instant his face lit up. “You, Julius! Why, that’s splendid! You’ll have to rough it a bit; but Louis will look after you. He’s really very good. Will you actually do it?”

“Of course I will – and glad to get it.”

“Well now, that is good!”

I knew that he was friendly towards me, but this seemed an excess of pleasure. Besides, his face, lately so weary and dreary, had assumed now the monkey smile which I knew so well – the smile it wore when he was “doing” somebody, getting the better of somebody by one of his tricks. But whom could he be doing now? Me? Lucinda? We two seemed the only possible victims. That we were victims – that we fitted into his plan – appeared clear, later on. But it was a mistake to suppose that we only were concerned. His next words enlightened me as to that.

“I should be most delighted to have you for a neighbor, under my roof, in any case. I’m sure you know that. Oh, yes, I’m grateful to you. You might have cut me! I know it. But you’ve taken a broad view. You’ve allowed for the heart – though not for the imagination, for the certainties that lie beyond probability. Besides all that – which I feel deeply – by taking that floor you relieve me of a little difficulty.”

“I’m glad to hear it. How’s that?”

“Since I came here, I have naturally paid some visits among my old friends. You smile! Oh, yes, I’m human enough to like congratulations. Some of them are people of rank, as you know – you used to chaff me about my grandees! Their names appear in the papers – those society paragraphs – the Paris editions of American papers – Oh, my Lord! My name appeared – an item – ‘Don Arsenio Valdez has returned to Palazzo Valdez!” He rose, went to the big bureau, and came back with a telegram. “Received to-day,” he added, as he put it into my hands.

I read it, looked across at him, and laughed. It was what I had expected; the only surprise was that Godfrey had taken rather long to track them. Scruples still obstinate, perhaps!

“So he wants to take an apartment in your palazzo, does he?”

“I’ve been under some obligations to him; it would be difficult to refuse. We’re good friends, but – I didn’t want him here. It wouldn’t be – convenient.” Now he was looking furtive and rather embarrassed, as if he were uncertain how much truth and how much lie he had better administer to me.

“I saw him in Paris,” I remarked, “the other day, and from what he said it seemed that he’d made very good friends both with you and with your wife.”

He smiled; having no such shame as ordinary mortals have, he accepted exposure easily. He relapsed into the truth quite gracefully. “I don’t know how the devil Lucinda feels about him,” he confessed. “I wish he wouldn’t come at all, but I can’t help that. At all events he needn’t be in the house with us now!”

“Have you any reason to suppose she doesn’t like him?” I asked.

His restlessness returned, and with it his dreary look. He got up and began to wander about the long room, fingering furniture and ornaments, then drifting back to me at the window, and the next moment away again. Suddenly, from the other end of the room, he came out with, “What have they told between them? Godfrey at Paris, and Lucinda here to-day?”

“Well, pretty nearly everything, I fancy. If you mean the money and Nina Dundrannan, and so forth. He described that meeting at Cimiez, for example.”

“Yes, they’ve told you everything – everything that matters. Well, what do you think?”

“If we’re to be friends, I’d sooner not offer an opinion.”

He flashed out at me. “There’s your code – your damned code! Didn’t I learn it in England? Didn’t I have it literally drubbed into me – thrashed into me – at school? And you keep it even when you love a woman!”

“H’m! Not always in that case, I’m afraid, Arsenio.”

“If you ever do love a woman,” he went on contemptuously. “For my part, I don’t believe any of you know how!” He came to a stand before me. “Why didn’t Waldo come after me and shoot me through the head?”

“There was the greatest difficulty in stopping him, I honestly assure you. But the war came, you know, and it was his duty – ”

“His duty! Oh, my Lord, his duty!” He positively groaned at the point of view. “I give you my word, if he had come after me, I would have never returned his fire. I would have bared my breast – so!” A rapid motion of his hands made as though to tear the clothes from his chest; it was a very dramatic gesture. “But when he didn’t come – pooh!”

“He was fighting for his country,” I suggested mildly.

“And even you might have taken up the quarrel with great propriety,” he said gravely.

“I apologize for not having shot you. Try not to be such an ass, Arsenio.”

“You and he can sit down under such an affront as I put on you and your family, and shelter yourselves under duty. Duty! But up go your noses and down go your lips when I, adoring the adorable, milk a couple of vulgar millionaires of a few pounds to make her happy, splendid, rich as she ought to be. Yes, yes, about that you – offer no opinion! And these people – my dupes, eh?”