Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/270

264 survived all her old links, and even those who had succeeded these had in their turn mostly passed away – the result being that to Venice and Venetian society at large she had become a tradition rather than a reality. Her eyes were a little weak, so that she looked generally more than half asleep, but her mind was never really asleep; her intuitions were wonderful, and she had never been known to make a mistake in her life. Her memory swept like a scythe over a stretch of some seventy years, and there was hardly a face nor a fact which she had forgotten in all that time. She had been in early days the most intimate friend of Lady Frances's mother, who had spent much of her youth in Vienna, where her father was ambassador, and where the Princess, then in the zenith of her marvellous beauty, had reigned a queen. Her feeling towards Lady Frances, therefore, was the half-affectionate, half-provoked feeling of an aunt or near family connection toward an awkward, well-intentioned schoolgirl, – a good girl, a fine creature at bottom, but too hopelessly gauche and undeveloped for anything, and without a soul to look after her or take any heed of her manners or deportment. And to Lady Frances herself, accustomed as she had been throughout a tolerably long lifetime to have the charge of a whole world, all depending on or sustained upon her shoulders, there was something infinitely amusing, and at the same time refreshing, in finding herself thus suddenly relegated back to childishness – put by her mother's old friend upon the footing of a schoolgirl, – she whom every one else thought so old! It made her feel as if she really were young again, – ardent, eager, vehement, impressionable – full of those hopes, dreams, confidences, aspirations, which had not been destined many of them, poor soul, to find any very tangible realisation.

The tide was low as Michael Angelo pushed the sandolo into the narrow canal, and fastened it at the foot of the steps leading to the garden. The hot sun brought out the strong acrid smell of the sea-weed, as it lay crinkling and drying up in the fervent blaze. Three or four small boys were bathing in the canal nearer to the lagune, their sleek black heads shining like those of seals under the glittering shadow of the archway. Myriads of small skip-jacks – "little pigs" Venetian children call them – fled before the advance of the sandolo, up into the cracks of the stone walls; and big, ugly crabs scuttled away, twiddling their antennæ vigorously with consternation. Leaving it and Michael Angelo under the glowing shadow of the walls, Lady Frances walked unannounced up the narrow path, and turning the corner of the house, came upon a little encampment, enclosed on three sides by an old red balustrade, from which point diverging lines of pergolas, muffled in verdure, led the eye insensibly away to the greys and the blues of the lagune. Here she found the Princess sitting in her usual place, under a big striped awning, which made a deep penthouse of shade over her venerable head. Four grotesque figures, in bright-red terra-cotta, grinned and grimaced at her from the corners of the balustrade; two magnificent cypresses towered immediately behind, under the pyramidical shadow of one of which sat Madame Bauche, the companion, – a deaf and elderly Frenchwoman, with a fat, good-humoured smile, which gave her somewhat the air of a Capuchin friar. A parrot, perched upon a