<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</SPAN></span></p>
<h2 class="p4">CHAPTER VI</h2>
<p class="pch">VENICE</p>
<p class="drop-cap04">THE instructions for which I was waiting did
not reach me for three days: I found reason
to suspect, later on, that bribery had
been at work; they had almost certainly been delayed,
copied, and communicated to enemy quarters.
The bulk of these enforcedly idle hours I spent
with Lucinda—at the restaurant, on the sea-front,
once or twice at my hotel, but never in the little
house where she had a room: I often escorted her
to the door, but she never asked me in. But we
grew intimate; she told, I think, all, or almost all,
the story, though often still with the air of examining
herself, or of rendering an account to herself,
rather than of being anxious to tell me: sometimes
she would seem even to forget my presence. At
other points, however, she would appeal directly to
me, even urgently, as though she hung on my verdict.
These changes gave variety and life to her
story; one saw her living again through all her
moods and experiences: on the other hand, it cannot
be denied that they lengthened the narrative.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1913—the spring after their<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</SPAN></span>
visit to Cragsfoot—her mother and Lucinda went to
stay on the top floor but one in Arsenio Valdez’s
palazzo at Venice, Valdez himself inhabiting the
attics immediately above them. Poverty, the satirist
remarked long ago, has no harsher incident
than that of making people ridiculous; it may have
worse moral effects. Mrs. Knyvett had not so
much accepted Valdez’s invitation as intrigued and
cadged for it; and they stayed rent free, though even
then Valdez was by no means a well-to-do man.
And Mrs. Knyvett could not receive favors in the
grand manner. She took, but she took cringingly;
she over-acknowledged, constantly by manner and
even by word, reminding the donor and herself of
the gift, reminding her daughter also. She did not,
it is true, know about the kiss in the garden at Cragsfoot;
Lucinda kept that to herself; her view was
that in her mother’s hands it would have been another
lever. “Arsenio lodged us free as it was; if
mother had known that, she’d have made him board
us too!” Even as it was, he seemed to have entertained
them a good deal (as was only natural)
while he played <i>cicerone</i>, showing them the sights
and pleasures of the place.</p>
<p>It was by no means Mrs. Knyvett’s intention or
desire that her daughter should marry Arsenio.
Her ambition flew higher. Cragsfoot was to her
still the most eligible prospect or project which had
so far presented itself; she kept in touch with it by
letters to Aunt Bertha; in them she angled for another<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</SPAN></span>
invitation there, just as she had cadged for
Arsenio’s invitation to the palazzo. How many
invitations does a charming daughter “make” in
the arithmetic of genteel poverty? Arsenio was
quite aware of her attitude towards him, but it
pleased his monkeyish humor to pretend to believe
that she favored a suit which he had himself no
intention of pressing. Arsenio could not afford to
marry a poor girl, and probably did not want to
marry at all. His taste was for a bachelor life,
and his affairs were in a precarious state. He could
hardly be said to live by gambling; he existed in
spite of it—in a seesaw between prosperity and
penury; as such men do, he splashed his <i>lire</i> about
when he had them; when he was “cleaned out,” he
would disappear from the ken of the Knyvetts for
a day or two, engaged in “milking” sundry old and
aristocratic friends of his father, who still resided
at Venice in a stately and gloomy seclusion, and
could be persuaded to open their not very fat purses
to help a gentleman of Spain who upheld the Legitimist
principle, as we know—from past events—that
Arsenio did! No, he certainly did not intend at the
beginning of their visit to mate poverty to poverty.</p>
<p>But—there was Lucinda! Lucinda under blue
skies by day and soft moonlight by night. There
was that secret memory between them, the meeting
of their lips; for him an incentive to gallantry, almost
an obligation, according to his code; for her,
more subtly, a tie, a union that she could not lightly<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</SPAN></span>
nor wholly disown. He did not speak of it directly,
but he would circle round it in talk, and smile in
an impish exchange of the unspoken memory; he
would laugh at Waldo, while with feigned sincerity
he praised his sterling qualities. “Oh, his reliability,
his English steadiness—dear, good, old Waldo!
You’d trust him—even in a gondola, Lucinda!”</p>
<p>The gondola! Let it stand for the whole of
Venice’s romantic paraphernalia; an old theme, a
picture painted a thousand times. No need to expatiate
on it here. To him it was all very familiar—the
nearest thing he had to a home; to her, of
course, it was a revelation. They were both susceptible
to impressions, to beauty. He retained his
sensibility, she developed hers. She saw new things
through his eyes; he saw old ones newly reflected in
the light of hers. His feelings regained freshness,
while hers grew to maturity—a warm ripeness in
which the man and the place were fused together
in one glowing whole. “Oh, I lived then!” she
cried, clasping her hands together and beating them
upon her knee.</p>
<p>Yet it must still have been with her own aloofness,
delicacy, difficulty of approach; the fires
gleamed through the veil, but the veil was round
them. He complained, it appeared, of her coldness,
of the distance at which she kept him, at relapses
into formality after hours of unreserved merriment.
Mrs. Knyvett chid her; was he not the
friend, the host, the benefactor? Within prudent<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</SPAN></span>
bounds he should be handsomely encouraged—and
rewarded. “Mother told me that well-bred girls
knew how to make themselves respected without
being prudish.” Maternal philosophy of an affectionately
utilitarian order—one eye on present
amenities, the other on grander prospects in the
future!</p>
<p>But was there no fear also in that maternal
breast? Did the situation and the actors raise no
apprehension? To some people—to how many?
Some have maintained to all!—morality is not a
master, but a good and ever vigilant servant. It
preserves the things that are of real value, the
marketable stuff. And it dignifies its watch and
ward with such high names, such sacred and binding
traditions, that—well, really, what between the
august sanctions on the one hand and the enormous
material advantages on the other, can it be dreamt
of that any reasonable girl will forget herself? So
one may suppose that Mrs. Knyvett reasoned. For
what, after all, is the “leading article” in a girl’s
stock-in-trade? Who, properly instructed, would
sell that under market price, and so stand bankrupt?</p>
<p>So much may be said in apology for Mrs. Knyvett’s
blindness to her daughter’s peril; for in peril
she was. Then an apology is needed for Arsenio?
It would show a lack of humor to tender it; it is
the last thing which those who have known and
liked Monkey Valdez would think of doing. He<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</SPAN></span>
was a “good Catholic” by tradition, and a gentleman
by breeding; but he was an honest man only
by fits and starts—when honesty appealed to his
histrionic sense, when it afforded him the chance of
a <i>beau geste</i>, when he felt himself under the eyes of
the men with whom he had been brought up, who
expect honesty even in dealings with women—at all
events, with girls of their own caste; who draw a
broad distinction between an intrigue and a seduction;
who are, in fact (not to labor the subject),
born and trained adepts in the niceties, some of
them curious, of the code of honor, which is certainly
not a religious rule or an ethical system, but
may be considered to embody the laws of sex warfare,
to be a Hague Convention between the sexes.</p>
<p>Yet there is no need to picture the poor Monkey
as the deliberate villain of the stage. Your true
villain must be deliberate and must rejoice in his
villainy, or all the salt is out of him. Arsenio was
certainly not deliberate, and in no way realized
himself as a villain. The event—the course of affairs
afterwards—proves that. He probably let
his boat drift pleasantly, delightfully, down the
river, till the swirl of rapids caught it; it is likely
that he was himself surprised; the under-nature
stormed the hesitating consciousness.</p>
<p>She gave me no particulars; I asked for none.
She shrank from them, as I did. It was after a delightful
evening alone together, on the water, that
it came. Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed; they were<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</SPAN></span>
alone, full of the attraction of each other—and of
“it all.” So Lucinda summed up the notoriously
amatory influences of the Adriatic’s Queen. She
appealed to me—woman now, to a man of middle
age—to understand how it happened. As she told
me—well, she hardly told me, she let me see—she
laid her hand in mine, her eyes sought mine,
straight, in question—yet hardly to me—rather to
some tribunal which she blindly sought, to which
she made a puzzled but not despairing, not altogether
too tragic, appeal: “At Cragsfoot he had
kissed my lips, you know; and I wasn’t angry. That
meant I liked him, didn’t it? That meant——?
That meant—the same?”</p>
<p>That seemed to me to record—as she, saying it,
still seemed to retain—a wonderful freedom from
the flesh. She judged things by the spirit. A terribly
dangerous criterion; anybody can distort it;
anybody may snigger at it—though I think that it
offers more resistance to an honest laugh. There
is a sort of pathos about it. Meant the same! Poor
dear! The gulf between the two things! Immeasurable!
Let speak religion (though there perhaps
the voices have varied), morality, prudence, the rest
of them! And virgin modesty? Shall we lay its
fall most essentially in the less or the greater—in
the parley or in the surrender? That’s what she
seemed to ask. But what answer could a plain man
of the world give her?</p>
<p>She had a few—a very few days of happiness,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</SPAN></span>
of forgetfulness of everything except their love.
Then the clouds gathered. She waited for a word
from him that did not come—not the first time that
he had kept her thus waiting—yet how different!
Arsenio grew fretful, disconsolate, and sometimes
sullen. One of his disappearances occurred; he was
raising the wind among his long-suffering aristocrats;
he was scraping together every coin he could and
throwing them all on the gaming table. If fortune
smiled, he would do the right thing, and do it handsomely;
if she frowned—and there could be no
doubt that she was frowning now—what lay before
him, before them? A scamped and mean <i>ménage à
trois</i>, existence eked out with the aid of Mrs. Knyvett’s
scanty resources, and soured by her laments!
No money for gayety, for play, to cut a figure with!
He shrank from the prospect. He could not trust
his love with it; probably he did not trust hers
either. He began to draw away from her; she would
not reproach or beseech. “I had taken the chances;
I had gambled too,” she said.</p>
<p>Unless something had happened which put Arsenio
under an even more imperative obligation—one
which, as I would fain believe, he must have honored—it
seems probable that the affair would in
any case have ended as it did; but the actual manner
of its ending was shaped by an external incident.</p>
<p>The two were sitting together one morning in the
Knyvett <i>salon</i>, Lucinda mending her gloves, Arsenio<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</SPAN></span>
doing nothing and saying nothing, melancholy
and fagged after a bout of gambling the night before.
Mrs. Knyvett came in, with an air of triumph,
holding a letter in her hand. She was still
ignorant of the situation; still sure that her daughter
was making herself respected—though surely less
apprehensive of her prudishness? And, while they
had been pursuing their devices, she had had hers
also to pursue. Success had crowned her efforts.
The letter was from “dearest Miss Fleming”; it invited
mother and daughter to pay another visit to
herself and Sir Paget as soon as they returned to
England; that is, in about six weeks; for they had
a stay with friends in Paris arranged in the immediate
future—a thing that had already begun to
trouble Lucinda.</p>
<p>“It’s delightful!” said Mrs. Knyvett. “Won’t it
help us splendidly through the summer! Any chance
of your being there too, Don Arsenio? That would
make it perfect!”</p>
<p>The good lady did not stay for an answer. She
had her hat on, and was going out to do her marketing.
She laid the letter down on the table between
them, and bustled out, her face still radiant
with the joy of successful maneuver.</p>
<p>So Cragsfoot, completely forgotten of recent
days, made its reëntry on the scene.</p>
<p>For a few moments they sat silent still, with the
letter between them. Then Lucinda said, “What
are we to do, Arsenio?” She raised her eyes from<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</SPAN></span>
her sewing and looked across at him. He did not
return her glance; he was scowling. The invitation
to Cragsfoot (he did not know about the French
visit, which Mrs. Knyvett could readily have put
off if she had preferred to stay on at Venice)
brought him up short; it presented him with an issue.
It forced Lucinda’s hand also. No mere excuse,
no mere plea of disinclination, would prevent Mrs.
Knyvett from going to Cragsfoot and taking her
daughter with her. To stay there was not only a
saving and a luxury, in her eyes it was also prestige—and
a great possibility!</p>
<p>“Damn Cragsfoot!” she heard him mutter. And
then he laid his head between his hands on the
table and began positively to sob. How much for
unsuccessful gambling, how much for too successful
love, Heaven knows! But Monkey Valdez sobbed.</p>
<p>She put down her work, went round to the back
of his chair, and put her arms about his neck. “I
know, I know, Arsenio. Don’t be so miserable,
dear. I understand. And—and there’s no harm
done. You only loved me too much—and if you
can’t do what—what I know you want to do——”</p>
<p>He raised his head and said (in what she called
“a dead voice”), “I’m what he called me, that’s
the truth. He called me a dirty Spaniard; he said
no English gentleman would do what I did. The
night I kissed you at Cragsfoot! Waldo!”</p>
<p>“He said that to you? He told you that?<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</SPAN></span>
Waldo? Oh, I knew he was very angry; but you’ve
never told me that he said that.”</p>
<p>“Then,” said Lucinda, as she told her story to
me, “I did something, or said something, that seemed
to make him suddenly angry. What he repeated—what
Waldo had said—somehow struck me with
a queer sense of puzzle. It seemed to put him and
Waldo back into the same sort of conflict—or, at
least, contrast—that I had seen them in at Cragsfoot.
I didn’t, of course, accept the ‘dirty Spaniard’
part; Waldo was just angry when he said that. But
the words did bring Waldo back to my mind—over
against Arsenio, so to speak. I don’t know whether
you’ve ever noticed that I sometimes fall into what
they call a brown study? I get thinking things over,
and rather forget that I’m talking to people. I
wasn’t angry with Arsenio; I was feeling sorry for
him; I loved him and wanted to comfort him. But
I had to think over what he had told me—not only
(perhaps not so much) as it bore on Arsenio, but as
it bore on myself—on what I had done and felt, and—and
allowed, you know. Well, Arsenio suddenly
called out, quite angrily, ‘You needn’t pull your arms
away like that!’ I had done it, but I hadn’t been
conscious of doing it; I didn’t think about it even
then. I was thinking of him—and Waldo. And I
know that I was smiling, as the old Cragsfoot days
came back to me. I wasn’t thinking in the least
about where my arms were! ‘Of course you and
Waldo are curiously different,’ I said.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“He jumped to his feet as if I had struck him,
and broke out in a torrent of accusation against
me. A few minutes before he had himself said
that Waldo had told the truth about him. Now
he declared that it was I who had said it. I hadn’t
said anything of the sort—at all events, meant anything
of the sort. I suppose I was sore in my heart,
but I should never have said a word. But he would
have it that I had meant it. He talked very fast,
he never stopped. And—I must tell you the truth,
Julius—it all seemed rather ridiculous to me, rather
childish. I believe that I listened to most of it smiling—oh,
not a merry smile, but a smile all the same.
I was waiting for him to work himself out, to run
down; it was no good trying to interrupt. And all
the time the contrast was in my mind—between him
and Waldo, between Waldo’s anger and—this! I
felt as I suppose a woman feels towards her naughty
child; I wanted to scold and to kiss him both at
once. I even thought of that wicked nickname that
Waldo has for him! At last—after a great deal
of it—he dashed one hand through his hair, thumped
the table with the other, and flung out at me, ‘Then
go to him! Go to your English gentleman! Leave
me in the gutter, where I belong!’ And he rushed
out of the room. I heard his steps pattering up
the stone stairs to his own floor.”</p>
<p>“You must have been terribly distressed,” I said—or
something formal of that kind.</p>
<p>“No. I didn’t believe that anything had really<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</SPAN></span>
happened. I waited half an hour to let him cool
down. But Mother might be back every minute;
there was still that question about Cragsfoot! I
had to have some answer! I went up to his apartment
and knocked. I got no answer. I went down
to Amedeo the <i>portière</i>, and he told me that Arsenio
had gone out ten minutes before—I hadn’t
heard his footsteps coming down again, he must
have stolen down softly; he was carrying a bag,
had a gondola called, and went off in the direction
of the station, saying that he would be back in a
few days. That was the end of—Venice!”</p>
<p>She came to a stop, gently strumming her fingers
on the arm of her chair. On an impulse I leant
forward and asked her a question: “Are you Madame
Valdez now, Lucinda?”</p>
<p>“Donna Lucinda Valdez, at your service, sir!
Since the day after you saw me in the taxi.”</p>
<p>“Then he must have explained—Venice?”</p>
<p>“Never. From the first day that we met again,
we have never mentioned Venice.” She touched my
arm for a moment. “I rather like that. It seems
to me rather a tactful apology, Julius. He began
courting me all afresh when he came to England.
At least he took it up from where it had stopped at
Cragsfoot.”</p>
<p>“It may be tactful; it’s also rather convenient,”
I commented gruffly. “It avoids explanations.”</p>
<p>A gleam of amusement lit up her eyes. “Poor
Arsenio! He was in a difficulty—in a corner. And<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</SPAN></span>
he’d been losing, his nerves were terribly wrong.
There was the question of—me! And the question
of Cragsfoot! And then Waldo came into
it—oh, I’m sure of that. Those two men—it’s
very odd. They seem fated to—to cross one another—to
affect one another sometimes. I wonder
whether——!” She broke off, knitting her brow.
“He sounded most genuine in that outbreak of his
when he mentioned Waldo. I think he was somehow
realizing what Waldo would think and say, if
he knew about Venice. Perhaps so, perhaps not!
As for the rest of it——”</p>
<p>“You think he wasn’t quite as angry as he pretended
to be?”</p>
<p>She seemed to reflect for a moment. “I didn’t
say his anger was unreal, did I? I said it was childish.
When a child runs heedlessly into something
and hurts himself, he kicks the thing and tells his
mother that it’s horrid. I was the thing, you see.
Arsenio’s half a child.” Again she paused. “He’s
also an actor. And he contrived, on the whole, a
pretty effective exit!”</p>
<p>“That you ever let him come back again is the
wonder!” I cried.</p>
<p>“No. It’s what happened before he came back
that puzzles me,” she said.</p>
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