Miss Barton smiled at his seriousness, crossing her hands placidly on the table and leaning forward. To her companion she gleamed, as if a wood-thing, a hamadryad, had slipped out from the laurel-tree and come to dine with him in the dusk.
The woman of the inn brought a flask of thin yellow wine and placed it between them. Lawrence mutely decanted it into the glasses.
Her companion turned his head away to the solemn, imperial mountains, that were preparing with purple and gold for a night's oblivion.
"You are thinking of Nassau Street, New York, of the rooms divided by glass partitions, and typewriters and the bundles of documents--bah! Chained!" She sipped scornfully a drop or two from the glass.
"No, not that exactly. I am thinking of the police courts, of the squalor, of taking a deposition in a cell with the filthy breathing all about. The daily jostle." He threw his head back.
"I am only over for six weeks, you know, health--"
"Yes? and there is a girl in Lowell,"--she read his mind impudently.
"Poor, starved one! Here is our fish and spaghetti. To-night is a night of feast."
The dusk grew grayer, more powderish; the mountains faded away, and the long Lido banks disappeared into lines pointed by the lights of Torcello and Murano. Sant' Elena became sea, and the evening wind from the Adriatic started in toward the city. A few sailors who had come for a glass were sitting under the arbor of the Buon Pesche smoking, with an occasional stinging word dropped nonchalantly into the dusk. Their hostess was working in the garden patch behind the house. At last the artist moved off with his companion through the grove of laurel between the great well-heads. Bastian loitered suggestively near.
So they gathered their thoughts and followed the gondolier to the bank. Miss Barton lingered by one of the well-heads to peer at the pitchy bottom.
"Here they came for fresh water, the last gift of Venice before they took sail. And sometimes a man never went farther--it was a safe kind of a grave." She laughed unconcernedly.
"Perhaps you came out of the locusts and took a hand in pitching the bodies in."
Bastian turned the prow into the current, heading to weather Sant' Elena. Lawrence took an oar silently. He liked the rush on the forward stroke, the lingering recovery. The evening puffs were cool. They slid on past a ghostly full-rigged ship from the north, abandoned at the point of Sant' Elena, until the black mass of trees in the Giardino Pubblico loomed up. A little off the other quarter the lights from the island of San Lazzaro gleamed and faded. It was so very silent on the waste of waters!