"Certainly not," he replied. "It's immoral to encourage mendicity."
She wept in the gondola. He thought her silly, and told her so. They landed at the Molo and he took her to drink chocolate at Florian's on the Piazza. She bent her meek head over the cup and the tears fell into it. A well-dressed Venetian couple who sat at the next table stared at her, passed remarks, and giggled outright with the ordinary and exquisite Italian politeness.
"My dear Eliza," said Hildebrand, "if you can't help being a victim to sickly sentimentality, at least, as my wife, you must learn to control yourself in public."
And meekly she controlled herself and drank her salted chocolate. In compliance with a timidly expressed desire, and in order to show his forgiveness, he escorted her into the open square, and like any vulgar Cook's tourist bought her a paper cornet of dried peas, wherewith, to his self-conscious martyrdom, she fed the pigeons. Seeing an old man some way off do the same, she scattered a few grains along the curled-up brim of her Leghorn hat; and presently, so still she was and gracious, an iridescent swarm enveloped her, eating from both hands outstretched and encircling her head like a halo. For the moment she was the embodiment of innocent happiness. But Hildebrand thought her notoriously absurd, and when he saw Lord and Lady Benham approaching them from the Piazzetta, he stepped forward and with an abrupt gesture sent the pigeons scurrying away. And she looked for the vanished birds with much the same scared piteousness as the one-legged beggar had looked for the lost two-lire piece.
After thirty years the memory of that afternoon flamed vivid, as he drew the strings of the idle scourge between his fingers. And then the puzzling darkness overspread his mind.
After a while he replaced the scourge in the cardboard box and summoned the club valet.
"Pack up all my things," said he. "I am going abroad to-morrow by the eleven o'clock train from Victoria."
Few English-speaking and, stranger still, few German-speaking guests stay at the Albergo Tonelli in Venice. For one thing, it has not many rooms; for another, it is far from the Grand Canal; and for yet another, the fat proprietor Ettore Tonelli and his fatter wife are too sluggish of body and brain to worry about _forestieri_ who have to be communicated with in outlandish tongues, and, for their supposed comfort, demand all sorts of exotic foolishness such as baths, punctuality, and information as to the whereabouts of fusty old pictures and the exact tariff of gondolas. The house was filled from year's end to year's end with Italian commercial travellers; and Ettore's ways and their ways corresponded to a nicety. The Albergo Tonelli was a little red-brick fifteenth-century palazzo, its Lombardic crocketed windows gaily picked out in white, and it dominated the _campiello_ wherein it was situated. In the centre of the tiny square was a marble well-head richly carved, and by its side a pump from which the inhabitants of the vague tumble-down circumambient dwellings drew the water to wash the underlinen which hung to dry from the windows. A great segment of the corner diagonally opposite the Albergo was occupied by the bare and rudely swelling brick apse of a seventeenth-century church. Two inconsiderable thoroughfares, _calle_ five foot wide, lead from the _campiello_ to the wide world of Venice.