Literary Love Letters and Other Stories by Robert Herrick

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Their hands touched for a moment. Then she said, hastily:

"Too late! There is Caspar. I forgot we were to go to Burano. Will you
join us?"

A figure in white ducks was coming toward them. His cordial smile seemed
to include a comment--a mental note of some hint he must give. "In stalks
the world of time and place," the young man muttered. "No, I will not go
with you."

He helped her into the waiting gondola. She settled back upon the
cushions, stretched one languid arm in farewell. He could feel the smile
with which she swept Caspar Severance, the women at work in the rio over
their kettles, the sun-bright stretch of waters--all impartially.

He lay down in the shade of the Redentore wall. Eight weeks ago there had
been a dizzy hour, a fainting scene in a crowded court-room, a
consultation with a doctor, the conventional prescription, a fortnight of
movement--then _this_. He had cursed that combination of nerve and tissue;
equally he cursed this. One word to his gondolier and in two hours he
could be on the train for Milan, Paris, London--then indefinite years of
turning about in the crowd, of jostling and being jostled. But he lay
still while the sun crept over him.

She was so unreal, once apart from her presence, like an evanescent mirage
on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen her, heard
her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had touched him;
that there had been moments when she stood with the flowers of the garden.

He shook the drowsy sun from his limbs and went away, closing the door
softly on the empty garden. Venice, too, was a shadow made between water
and sun. The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of cool water
alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens, until he came
to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Canal.
Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades,
the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into
silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous
world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice
that mocked the little goings up and down of men.

III

In the afternoon Lawrence and Severance were dawdling over coffee in the
Piazza. A strident band sent up voluminous notes that boomed back and
forth between the palace and the stone arches of the procurate.

"And Burano?" Lawrence suggested, idly. The older man nodded.

"We lunched there--convent--Miss Barton bought lace."

He broke the pause by adding, negligently:

"I think I shall marry her."

Lawrence smoked; he could see the blue water about San Giorgio.

"Marry her," he repeated, vaguely. "You are engaged?"

Severance nodded.

The young man reached out a bony hand. One had but to wait to still the
problems of life. They strolled across the piazza.

"When do you leave?" Severance inquired.

"To-night," almost slipped from the young man's lips. He was murmuring to
himself. "I have played with Venice and lost. I must return to my busy
village."

"I can't tell," he said.

Severance daintily stepped into a gondola. "La Giudecca."

Lawrence turned into the swarming alleys leading to the Rialto.

Streams of Venetians were eddying about the cul-de-sacs and enclosed
squares, hurrying over the bridges of the canals, turning in and out of
the calles, or coming to rest at the church doors. Lawrence drifted
tranquilly on. He had slipped a cable; he was free and ready for the open
sea. Following at random any turning that offered, he came out suddenly
upon Verocchio's black horseman against the black sky. The San Zanipolo
square was deserted; the cavernous San Zanipolo tenanted by tombs. Stone
figures, seated, a-horse, lying carved in death, started out from the
silent walls.

"Condottieri," the man muttered, "great robbers who saw and took!
Briseghella, Mocenigo, Leonardo Loredan, Vittore Capello." He rolled the
powerful names under his breath. "They are right--Take, enjoy; then die."
And he saw a hill sleeping sweetly in the mountains, where the sun rested
on its going down, and a villino with two old trees where the court seemed
ever silent. In the stealthy, passing hours she came and sat in the sun,
and _was_. And the two remembered, looking on the valley road, that
somewhere lay in the past a procession of storms and mornings and nights
which was called the world, and a procession of people which was called
life. But she looked at him and smiled.

Outside in the square the transparent dusk of Venice settled down. In the
broad canal of the Misericordia a faint plash and drip from a passing
gondola; then, in a moment, as the boat rounded into the rio, a resounding
"Stai"; again silence and the robber in bronze.

IV

He waited for a sign from the Giudecca. He told himself that Theodosia
Barton was not done with him yet, nor he with her.

The tourist-stream, turning northward from Rome and Florence, met in
Venice a new stream of Germans. The paved passage beside the hotel garden
was alive with a cosmopolitan picnic party. Lawrence lingered and watched;
perhaps when the current set strongly to the north again, it would carry
him along with it.

He had not seen Caspar Severance. Each day of delay made it more awkward
to meet him, made the confession of disappointment more obvious, he
reflected. Each day it was easier to put out to the lagoons for a still
dream, and return when the Adriatic breeze was winding into the heated
calles. Over there, in the heavy-scented garden on the Giudecca, lined
against a purplish sea, she was resting; she had given free warning for
him to go, but she was there----.

"She holds me here in the Mare Morto, where the sea-weeds wind about and
bind."

And he believed that he should meet her somewhere in the dead lagoon, out
yonder around the city, in the enveloping gloom of the waters which held
the pearl of Venice.

So each afternoon his gondola crept out from the Fondamenta del Zattere
into the ruffling waters of the Giudecca canal, and edged around the
deserted Campo di Marte. There the gondolier labored in the viscous sea-
grass.

One day, from far behind, came the plash of an oar in the channel. As the
narrow hull swept past, he saw a hand gather in the felza curtains, and a
woman kneel to his side.

"So Bastian takes you always to the dead sea," she tossed aboard.

"Bastian might convoy other forestieri," Lawrence defended.

"Really? here to the laguna morta?" and as his gondola slid into the
channel, she added:

"I knew you were in Venice; you could not go without--another time."

"What would that bring?" he questioned her with his eyes.

"How should I know?" she answered, evasively. "Come with me out to the San
Giorgio in Alga. It is the loneliest place in Venice!"

Lawrence sat at her feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed banks.
Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray clouds grew over the horizon.

"Rain."

She shook her head. "For the others, landward. Those opalescent clouds
streaking the sky are merely the undertone of Venice; they are always
_here_."

"The note of sadness," he suggested.

"You thought to have ended with _me_."

She rested her head on her hands and looked at him. He preferred to have
her mention Caspar Severance.

"Whenever I was beyond your eyes, you were not quite sure. You went back
to your hotel and wondered. The wine was over strong for your temperate
nerves, and there was so much to do elsewhere!" she mocked him.

"After all, I was a fragment. And you judged in your wise new-world
fashion that fragments were--useless."

Just ahead was a tiny patch of earth, rimmed close to the edge by ruined
walls. The current running landward drew them about the corner, under the
madonna's hand, and the gondola came to rest beside the lichens and
lizards of a crumbling wharf.

"No," she continued, "I shall not let you go so easily." One hand fell
beside his arm, figuratively indicating her thought.

"And I shall carry you off," he responded, slowly. "It lies between you--
and all, everything."

The gondolier had gone ashore. Silence had swallowed him up.

"All, myself and the others; effort, variety--for the man who loves _you_,
there is but one act in life."

"Splendid!" Her lips parted as if savoring his words.

His voice went on, low, strained to plunge his words into her heart.

"You are the woman, the curious thing that God made to stir life. You
would draw all activities to you, and through you nothing may pass. Like
the dead sea of grass you encompass the end of desire. You have been with
me from my manhood, the fata morgana that laughed at my love of other
creatures. I must meet you, I knew, face to face!"

His lips closed.

"Go on!"

"I have met you," he added, sullenly, "and should I turn away, I should
not forget you. You will go with me, and I shall hunger for you and hate
you, and you will make it over, my life, to fill the hollow of your hand."

"To fill the hollow of my hand," she repeated softly, as if not
understanding.

"You will mould it and pat it and caress it, until it fits. You will never
reason about it, nor doubt, nor talk; the tide flows underneath into the
laguna morta, and never wholly flows out. God has painted in man's mind
the possible; and he has painted the delusions, the impossible--and that
is woman?"

"Impossible," she murmured. "Oh, no, not that!"

Her eyes compelled him; her hand dropped to his hand. Venice sank into a
gray blot in the lagoon. The water was waveless like a deep night.

"Possible for a moment," he added, dreamily, "possible as the unsung
lyric. Possible as the light of worlds behind the sun and moon. Possible
as the mysteries of God that the angels whisper----"

"The only possible," again her eyes flamed; the dark hair gleamed black
above the white face.

"And that is enough for us forever!"

V

The heavy door of the Casa Lesca swung in, admitting Lawrence to a damp
stone-flagged room. At the farther end it opened on a little cortile,
where gnarled rose-bushes were in bloom. A broken Venus, presiding over a
dusty fountain, made the centre of the cortile, and there a strapping girl
from the campagna was busy trimming the stalks of a bunch of roses. The
signorina had not arrived; Lawrence lounged against the gunwale of a
gondola, which lay on one side of the court.

A pretentious iron gate led from the cortile to the farm, where the
running vines stretched from olive-stump to trellis, weaving a mat of
undulating green. It was so quiet, here in the rear of the palace, that
one could almost hear the hum of the air swimming over the broad vine
leaves.

Lawrence, at first alert, then drowsy, reclined in the shade, and watched
the girl. From time to time she threw him a soft word of Venetian. Then,
gathering her roses, she shook them in his face and tripped up the stairs
to the palace above.

He had made the appointment without intention, but he came to fulfil it in
a tumult of energy.

_She_ must choose and _he_ arrange--for that future which troubled his
mind. But the heated emptiness of the June afternoon soothed his will. He
saw that whatever she bade, that he would do. Still here, while he was
alone, before her presence came to rule, he plotted little things. When he
was left with himself he wondered about it; no, he did not want her, did
not want it! His life was over there, beyond her, and she must bend to
that conception. People, women, anyone, this piece of beauty and sense,
were merely episodic. The sum was made from all, and greater than all.

The door groaned, and he turned to meet her, shivering in the damp
passage. She gathered a wrap about her shoulders.

"Caspar would not go," she explained, appealingly.

"Which one is to go?" the young man began. She sank down on a bench and
turned her head wearily to the vineyard. Over the swaying tendrils of the
vine, a dark line, a blue slab of salt water, made the horizon.

"Should I know?" her face said, mutely.

"He thinks you should," she spoke, calmly. "He has been talking two hours
about you, your future, your brilliant performances----"

"That detained you!"

"He is plotting to make you a great man. You belong to the world, he said,
and, the world would have you. They need you to plan and exhort, I
believe."

"So you come to tell me--"

"Let us go out to the garden." She laid her hand reprovingly on his arm.
"We can see the pictures later."

She took his arm and directed him down the arched walk between the vines,
toward the purple sea.

"I did not realize that--that you were a little Ulysses. He warned me!"

"Indeed!"

"That you would love and worship at any wayside shrine; that the spirit of
devotion was not in you."

"And you believed?"

She nodded.

"It seemed so. I have thought so. Once a few feet away and you are
wondering!"

The young man was guiltily silent.

"And I am merely a wayside chapel, good for an idle prayer."

"Make it perpetual."

Her arm was heavy.

"Caspar wants you--away. He will try to arrange it. Perhaps you will
yield, and I shall lose."

"You mean he will make them recall me."

She said nothing.

"You can end it now." He stopped and raised her arm. They stood for a
moment, revolving the matter; a gardener came down the path. "You will get
the message tonight," she said, gloomily. "Go! The message will say
'come,' and you will obey."

Lawrence turned.

"Shall we see the pictures?"

The peasant girl admitted them to the hall, and opened, here and there, a
long shutter. The vast hall, in the form of a Latin cross, revealed a
dusky line of frescoes.

"Veronese," she murmured. Lawrence turned to the open window that looked
across the water to the piazza. Beneath, beside the quay, a green-painted
Greek ship was unloading grain. Some panting, half-naked men were
shovelling the oats.

"We might go," he said; "Caspar is probably waiting for his report. You
can tell him that he has won."

Suddenly he felt her very near him.

"No, not that way!"

"You are good to--love," she added deliberatively, placing her hands
lightly on his heart.

"You do not care enough; ah! that is sad, sad. Caspar, or denial, or God--
nothing would stand if you cared, more than you care for the little people
and things. See, I can take you now. I can say you are mine. I can make
you love--as another may again. But love me, now, as if no other minute
could ever follow."

She sighed the words.

"Here I am, to be loved. Let us settle nothing. Let us have this minute
for a few kisses."

The hall filled with dusk. The girl came back again. Suddenly a bell began
ringing.

"Caspar," she said. "Stay here; I will go."

"We will go together."

"No," she waved him back. "You will get the message. Caspar is right. You
are not for any woman for always."

"Go," he flung out, angrily.

The great doors of the hall had rattled to, leaving him alone half will-
less. He started and then returned to the balcony over the fondamenta.
In the half-light he could see her stepping into a waiting gondola, and
certain words came floating up clearly as if said to him----

"To-morrow evening, the Contessa Montelli, at nine." But she seemed to be
speaking to her companion. The gondola shot out into the broad canal.

VI

The long June day, Lawrence sat with the yellow cablegram before his eyes.
The message had come, indeed, and the way had been cleared. Eleven--the
train for Paris! passed; then, two, and now it was dusk again.

Had she meant those words for him? So carelessly flung back. That he would
prove.

* * * * *

"The signorina awaits you." The man pointed to the garden, and turned back
with his smoking lamp up the broad staircase that clung to one side of the
court. Across the strip of garden lay a bar of moonlight on the grass.

She was standing over the open well-head at the farther end where the
grass grew in rank tufts. The gloomy wall of the palace cast a shadow that
reached to the well. Just as he entered, a church-clock across the rio
struck the hour on a cracked bell.

"My friend has gone in--she is afraid of the night air," Miss Barton
explained. "Perhaps she is afraid of ghosts," she added, as the young man
stood silent by her side. "An old doge killed his wife and her children
here, some centuries ago. They say the woman walks. Are you afraid?"

"Of only one ghost----"

"Not yet a ghost!" Indeed, her warm, breathing self threw a spirit of life
into the moonlight and gainsaid his idle words.

"I have come for you," he said, a little peremptorily. "To do it I have
lost my engagement with life."

"So the message came. You refused, and now you look for a reward. A man
must be paid!"

"I tried to keep the other engagement and could not!"

"I shall make you forget it, as if it were some silly boyish dream." She
began to walk over the moonlit grass. "I was waiting for that--sacrifice.
For if you desire _me_, you must leave the other engagements, always."

"I know it."

"I lie in the laguna morta, and the dead are under me, and the living are
caught in my sea-weed." She laughed.

"Now, we have several long hours of moonlight. Shall we stay here?"

The young man shivered.

"No, the Lady Dogessa might disturb us. Let us go out toward Murano."

"Are you really--alive and mine, not Severance's?" he threw out,
recklessly.

She stopped and smiled.

"First you tell me that I disturb your plans; then you want to know if I
am preoccupied. You would like to have me as an 'extra' in the
subscription."

As they came out on the flags by the gondola, another boat was pushing a
black prow into the rio from the Misericordia canal. It came up to the
water-steps where the two stood. Caspar Severance stepped out.

"Caspar!" Miss Barton laughed.

"They told me you were here for dinner," he explained. He was in evening
clothes, a Roman cloak hanging from his shoulders. He looked, standing on
the steps below the other two, like an impertinent intrusion.

"Lawrence! I thought you were on your way home."

Lawrence shook his head. All three were silent, wondering who would dare
to open the final theme.

"The Signora Contessa had a headache," Miss Barton began, nonchalantly.

Severance glanced skeptically at the young American by her side.

"So you fetched il dottore americano? Well, Giovanni is waiting to carry
us home."

Miss Barton stepped forward slowly, as if to enter the last gondola whose
prow was nuzzling by the steps.

Lawrence took her hand and motioned to his gondola.

"Miss Barton----"

Severance smiled, placidly.

"You will miss the midnight train."

The young man halted a moment, and Miss Barton's arm slipped into his
fingers.

"Perhaps," he muttered.

"The night will be cool for you," Severance turned to the woman. She
wavered a moment.

"You will miss more than the midnight train," Severance added to the young
fellow, in a low voice.

Lawrence knelt beside his gondola. He glanced up into the face of the
woman above him. "Will you come?" he murmured. She gathered up her dress
and stepped firmly into the boat. Severance, left alone on the fondamenta,
watched the two. Then he turned back to his gondola. The two boats floated
out silently into the Misericordia Canal.

"To the Cimeterio," Miss Barton said. "To the Canale Grande," Severance
motioned.

The two men raised their hats.

* * * * *

For a few moments the man and the woman sat without words, until the
gondola cleared the Fondamenta Nuova, and they were well out in the sea of
moonlight. Ahead of them lay the stucco walls of the Cimeterio, glowing
softly in the white light. Some dark spots were moving out from the city
mass to their right, heading for the silent island.

"There goes the conclusion," Lawrence nodded to the funeral boats.

"But between us and them lies a space of years--life."

"Who decided?"

"You looked. It was decided."

The city detached itself insensibly from them, lying black behind. A light
wind came down from Treviso, touching the white waves.

"You are thinking that back there, up the Grand Canal, lie fame and
accomplishment. You are thinking that now you have your fata
morgana--nothing else. You are already preparing a grave for her in your
mind!"

Lawrence took her head in his hands. "Never," he shot out the word.
"Never--you are mine; I have come all these ocean miles to find you. I
have come for an accounting with the vision that troubles man." Her face
drew nearer.

"I am Venice, you said. I am set in the mare morto. I am built on the sea-
weed. But from me you shall not go. You came over the mountains for this."

The man sighed. Some ultimate conception of life seemed to outline itself
on the whitish walls of the Cimeterio--a question of sex. The man would go
questioning visions. The woman was held by one.

"Caspar Severance will find his way, and will play your game for you," she
went on coaxingly. "But this," her eyes were near him, "_this_ is a moment
of life. You have chosen. There is no mine and thine."

One by one the campaniles of Venice loomed, dark pillars in the white sky.
And all around toward Mestre and Treviso and Torcello; to San Pietro di
Castello and the grim walls of the arsenal, the mare morto heaved gently
and sighed.

CHICAGO, January, 1897.

THE PRICE OF ROMANCE

They were paying the price of their romance, and the question was whether
they would pay it cheerfully. They had been married a couple of years, and
the first flush of excitement over their passion and the stumbling-blocks
it had met was fading away. When he, an untried young lawyer and delicate
dilettante, had married her she was a Miss Benton, of St. Louis, "niece of
Oliphant, that queer old fellow who made his money in the Tobacco Trust,"
and hence with no end of prospects. Edwards had been a pleasant enough
fellow, and Oliphant had not objected to his loafing away a vacation about
the old house at Quogue. Marriage with his niece, the one remaining member
of his family who walked the path that pleased him, was another thing. She
had plenty of warning. Had he not sent his only son adrift as a beggar
because he had married a little country cousin? He could make nothing out
of Edwards except that he was not keen after business--loafed much, smoked
much, and fooled with music, possibly wrote songs at times.

Yet Miss Benton had not expected that cruel indifference when she
announced her engagement to the keen old man. For she was fond of him and
grateful.

"When do you think of marrying?" had been his single comment. She guessed
the unexpressed complement to that thought, "You can stay here until that
time. Then good-by."

She found in herself an admirable spirit, and her love added devotion and
faith in the future, her lover's future. So she tided over the months of
her engagement, when her uncle's displeasure settled down like a fog over
the pleasant house. Edwards would run down frequently, but Oliphant
managed to keep out of his way. It was none of his affair, and he let them
see plainly this aspect of it. Her spirit rose. She could do as other
women did, get on without candy and roses, and it hurt her to feel that
she had expected money from her uncle. She could show him that they were
above that.

So they were married and went to live in a little flat in Harlem, very
modest, to fit their income. Oliphant had bade her good-by with the
courtesy due to a tiresome Sunday visitor. "Oh, you're off, are you?" his
indifferent tones had said. "Well, good-by; I hope you will have a good
time." And that was all. Even the colored cook had said more; the servants
in general looked deplorable. Wealth goes so well with a pretty, bright
young woman!

Thus it all rested in the way they would accept the bed they had made.
Success would be ample justification. Their friends watched to see how
well they would solve the problem they had so jauntily set themselves.

Edwards was by no means a _faineant_--his record at the Columbia Law
School promised better than that, and he had found a place in a large
office that might answer for the stepping-stone. As yet he had not
individualized himself; he was simply charming, especially in correct
summer costume, luxuriating in indolent conversation. He had the well-
bred, fine-featured air of so many of the graduates from our Eastern
colleges. The suspicion of effeminacy which he suggested might be unjust,
but he certainly had not experienced what Oliphant would call "life." He
had enough interest in music to dissipate in it. Marriage was an excellent
settler, though, on a possible income of twelve hundred!

The two years had not the expected aspiring march, however; ten-dollar
cases, even, had not been plenty in Edwards's path, and he suspected that
he was not highly valued in his office. He had been compelled to tutor a
boy the second year, and the hot summers made him listless. In short, he
felt that he had missed his particular round in the ladder. He should have
studied music, or tried for the newspapers as a musical critic.
Sunday afternoons he would loll over the piano, picturing the other life--
that life which is always so alluring! His wife followed him heroically
into all his moods with that pitiful absorption such women give to the men
they love. She believed in him tremendously, if not as a lawyer, as a man
and an artist. Somehow she hadn't been an inspiration, and for that she
humbly blamed herself. How was it accomplished, this inspiration? A loving
wife inspired the ordinary man. Why not an artist?

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