These ladies occupied rooms on the third floor of a palace on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, not far below the Piazzetta. The palace was a stately example of Renaissance architecture, with three rows of majestic polished columns extending one above the other across its front. Between these columns the American tenant, who had once been called "the lily," and her niece, who was so like a Bonifazio, looked out upon the golden Venetian light--a light whose shadows are colors: mother-of-pearl, emerald, orange, amber, and all the changing gradations between them--thrown against and between the reds, browns, and fretted white marbles of the buildings rising from the water; that ever-moving water which mirrors it all--here a sparkling, glancing surface, there a mysterious darkness, both of them contrasting with the serene blue of the sky above, which is barred towards the riva by the long, lean, sharply defined lateen spars of the moored barks, and made even more deep in its hue over the harbor by the broad sails of the fishing-sloops outlined against it, as they come slowly up the channel, rich, unlighted sheets of tawny yellow and red, with a great cross vaguely defined upon them.

Next to the Renaissance palace was a smaller one, narrow and high, of mediaeval Gothic, ancient and weather-stained; it had lancet-windows, adorned above with trefoil, and a little carved balcony like old Venetian lace cut in marble. Here Mr. and Mrs. Lenox occupied the floor above that occupied by the ladies in the larger palace. Communication was direct, however, owing to a hallway, like a little covered bridge, that crossed the ca.n.a.l which flowed between--a ca.n.a.l narrow, dark, and still, that worked away silently all day and all night at its life-long task of undermining the ponderous walls on each side; gaining perhaps a half-inch in a century, together with the lighter achievement of eating out the painted wooden columns which, like lances set upright in the sand at a tent's door, the old Venetians were accustomed to plant in the tide round their water-washed entrances. At four o'clock the little company started, the three from the Gothic palace having come across the hall bridge to join the others. Two gondolas were in waiting; as the afternoon was warm, they had light awnings instead of the antique black tops, with the sombre drapery sweeping out behind.

"I like the black tops better," observed Claudia. "Any one can have an awning, but the black tops are Venetian."

"They can easily be changed," said Lenox.

"Oh no; not in this heat," objected Mrs. Marcy. "We should stifle. Mr.

Blake, shall you and I, as the selfish elders, take this one, and let the younger people go together in that?"

"I want to go in the one with the red awning--the _bright_ red," said Theocritus. This was the one Mrs. Marcy had selected.

"No, no, my boy; the other will do quite as well for you," said Lenox.

"It won't," replied the child, in a decided little voice.

"It is not of the slightest consequence," graciously interposed Mrs.

Marcy, signalling to the other gondola, and, with Blake's a.s.sistance, taking her place within it.

Mr. Lenox glanced at his wife. She was occupied in folding a shawl closely over the boy's little overcoat. "Come, then," he said, giving his hand first to Miss Marcy, then to his wife and the child. The gondolas floated out on the broad stream.

Claudia talked; she talked well, and took the Venetian tone. "The only thing that jars upon me," she said, after a while, "is that these Venetians of to-day--those men and women we are pa.s.sing on the riva now, for instance--do not appreciate in the least their wonderful water-city--scarcely know what it is."

"They don't study 'Venice' because they are Venice--isn't that it?" said Mrs. Lenox. She had soothed the little boy into placidity, and he sat beside her quietly, with one gloved hand in hers, a small m.u.f.fled figure, with a pale face whose delicate skin was lined like that of an old man. His eyes were narrow, deep-set, and dark under his faintly outlined fair eyebrows; his thin hair so light in hue and cut so closely to his head that it could scarcely be distinguished.

"I hope not," said Claudia, answering Mrs. Lenox's remark--"at least, I hope the old Venetians were not so; I like to think that they felt, down to their very finger-tips, all the richness and beauty about them."

"You may be sure the feeling was unconscious compared with ours,"

replied Mrs. Lenox. "They did not consult authorities about the pictures; they were the pictures. They did not study history; they made it. They did not read romances; they lived them."

"I wish I could have lived then," murmured Miss Marcy, her eyes resting thoughtfully on the red tower of San Giorgio, rising from the blue. No veil obscured the beautiful tints of her face; Claudia's complexion could brave the brightest light, the wind, and the sun. The dark-blue plume of the round hat she wore curled down over the rippled sunny braids of her hair. Mr. Lenox was looking at her. But Mr. Lenox was often looking at her.

"That would not be at all nice for us," said Mrs. Lenox, in her pleasant voice, answering the young lady's wish. "If you, Miss Marcy, can step back into the fifteenth century without trouble, we cannot; Stephen and I are very completely of this poor nineteenth."

"I don't know," said Claudia, slowly; she looked at "Stephen" with meditative eyes. "He could have been one of the soldiers. You remember that Venetian portrait in the Uffizi at Florence--General Gattamelata?

Mr. Lenox does not look like it; but in armor he would look quite as well."

"I don't remember it," said Mrs. Lenox, turning to see why Theocritus was beating upon her knees with his right fist.

"You must remember--it is so superb!" said Claudia.

"I want to sit on the other side," announced Theocritus.

"When we come back, dear. See, the church is quite near; we shall soon be there now," answered his aunt.

"You remember it, don't you?" said Claudia to Lenox.

"Perfectly."

"No--_now_," piped Theocritus. "The wind is blowing down my back."

"If he is cold, Stephen--" said Mrs. Lenox.

"I will change places with him," replied her husband. "Do not move, Miss Marcy."

"No; Aunt Lizzie must go too!" said the boy. He had wrinkled up his little face until he looked like an aged dwarf in a temper; he stretched back his lips over his little square white teeth, and glared at his uncle and Miss Marcy.

"Let me change--do," said Claudia, rising as she spoke. And Mrs. Lenox accepted the offer.

"When you have finished my portrait, suppose you paint yourself as a fifteenth-century Venetian general," continued Miss Marcy, taking up again the thread of conversation which had been broken by Theocritus's obstinacy. "The portrait of a man painted by himself is always interesting; you can see then what he thinks he is."

"And is not?" said Lenox.

"Possibly. Still, what he might be. It is his ideal view of himself, and I believe in ideals. It is only our real, purified--what we shall all attain, I hope, in another world."

Thus she talked on. And the man to whom she talked thought it a loveliness of nature that she pa.s.sed so naturally and unnoticingly over the demeanor of the spoiled child who accompanied them. Mrs. Lenox could, for the present take no further part in the conversation, as Theocritus had demanded that she should relate to him the legend of St.

Mark, St. George, and St. Theodore climbing down from their places over the church porch, the palace window, and the crocodile column to fight the demons of the lagoons. This she did, but in so low a tone that the conversation of the others was not interrupted.

They reached the island and landed; Mrs. Marcy and Blake were already there, sitting on the sun-warmed steps of the church whose smooth white facade and red campanile are so conspicuous from Venice. "We were discussing the shape of the prow of the gondola," said Mrs. Marcy, as they came up. "To me it looks like the neck of a swan." Mrs. Marcy never sought for new terms; if the old ones were only poetical--she was a stickler for that--she used them as they were, contentedly.

Mr. Blake, who always took the key-note of the conversation in which he found himself, advanced the equally veteran comparison of the neck of a violin.

"It is the shining blade of St. Theodore, the patron of the gondolas,"

suggested Claudia.

"To me it looks a good deal like the hammer of a sewing-machine,"

observed Mrs. Lenox, lightly. This was so true that they all had to laugh.

"But this will never do, Mrs. Lenox," said Blake, turning to look at her as she stood on the broad marble step, holding the little boy's hand; "you will destroy all our carefully prepared atmosphere with your modern terms. Here we have all been reading up for this expedition, and we know just what Ruskin thinks; wait a bit, and you will hear us talk! And not one will be so rude as to recognize a single adjective."

"You admire him, then--Ruskin?" said the lady.

"Admire? That is not the word; he is the divinest madman! Ah, but he makes us work! In some always inaccessible spot he discovers an inscrutably beautiful thing, and then he goes to work and writes about it fiercely, with all his nouns in capitals, and his adjectives after the nouns instead of before them--which naturally awes us. But what produces an even deeper thrill is his rich way of spreading his possessive cases over two words instead of one, as, 'In the eager heart of him,' instead of 'In his eager heart.' This cows us completely."

"I want to go in the church. I don't want to stay out here any longer,"

announced Theocritus. And, as his aunt let him have his way, the others followed her, and they all went in together.

Compared with the warm sunshine without, the silent aisles seemed cool.

After ten minutes or so Mrs. Marcy and Blake came out, and seated themselves on the step again. "You have known her for some time?" Blake was saying.

"Mrs. Lenox? No; only since we first met here, six--I mean seven--weeks ago. But Stephen Lenox I have always known, or rather known about; he is a distant connection of mine. His history has been rather unusual. His mother, a widow, managed to educate him, but that was all; they were really very poor, and Stephen was hard at work before he was twenty. He had some sort of a clerkship in an iron-mill, and was kept at it, I was told, twelve and thirteen hours a day. Before he was twenty-two he married. He worked harder than ever then, although he had, I believe, in time a better place. His wife had no money, either, and she was not strong. Their two little children died. Well, after twelve years of this, most unexpectedly, by the will of an uncle by marriage, he came into quite a nice little fortune; the uncle said, I was told, that he admired a man who, in these days, had never had or asked for the least help from his relatives. And so Stephen could at last do as he pleased, and very soon afterwards they came abroad. For he had been an artist at heart all this time, it seems--at least, he has a great liking for painting, and even, I think, some skill."

"I doubt if he is a creative artist," answered Blake. "He is too well balanced for that--a strong, quiet fellow. His wife is of about his age, I presume?"

"Yes; he is thirty-six, and she the same. They have been over here already nearly two years. She is a very nice little woman" (Mrs. Lenox was tall and slender; but Mrs. Marcy always patronized Mrs. Lenox), "although one _does_ get extremely tired of that spoiled boy she drags about. Do you know," added the lady, deeply, "I feel sure it would be much better for Elizabeth Lenox if she would remember her present circ.u.mstances more; there is no longer any necessity for an invariable untrimmed gray gown."

"Doesn't she dress well?" said Blake. "I thought she always looked very neat."