Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/272

266 but you are young, you do not fear for your digestion. Just look at all those rows of them there in that border – it is a sin, is it not, that no one comes to eat them? Ah, and Fanchon, you that are so strong and active, will you go and pick me some of that daphne? See the great bush! All this afternoon I have been sighing for it, but Bauche is so fat I have not the heart to ask her. The scissors? There they are on the wall, close to that little red man's feet."

Lady Frances found the scissors and cut the daphne, and brought a great bunch of it to her old friend, who buried her face in it till the white satin cap ribbons were dusted with yellow pollen. Then the visitor got a low chair, and sat down close to the other's couch, not talking much, but resting, enjoying herself, dreaming. It was unspeakably restful, unspeakably green, and silent, and delightful. No one else came, and she sat on and on, listening to the occasional chimes of the Redentore, whose great grey-slated cupola showed over the tops of the acacia-trees; catching an occasional gleam of some white sail upon the broad face of the lagune, where the pink campanile of the Armenian convent alone, of all the world of houses and churches without, was visible through a break in the trees. Her shyness, her self-consciousness – those two lifelong banes of her poor existence – were quietly lulled away here and laid to sleep. It would have been as impossible indeed to be shy or self-conscious in a tomb as in that peaceful retreat, where everything spoke of growth, of the freshness of spring, of slow, kindly, gentle, inexorable decay. It seemed to her as if time itself had somehow fallen asleep; as if she had reached a land which we all of us occasionally dream of, where everything flows by to a tune of running water; where struggles, troubles, inequalities, disagreeables of all sorts are put away, not for a while, for a minute or two, but for ever, and ever, and ever. Fat Madame Bauche, with her false front and her monastic smile; the asthmatic Titi; the undemonstrative parrot; the ugly little terra-cotta statuettes which grinned from the four corners of the balustrade; the old lady herself, with her shaking hands and delicate reticulations of wrinkles, – they were not, any of them, ideal tenants of a paradise perhaps, and yet, like some Gothic building in which the very grotesqueness is an element of the beauty, they all seemed to harmonise – to form part of the beauty of the spot, of that peace which encompassed it as with a green curtain, shutting out everything that seems discordant – which seemed to belong to its very stones.

"So you have got steamers now!" the Princess said, suddenly opening her eyes after a long interval of silence, during which she seemed to have lapsed into a profound doze.

"Steamers?" Lady Frances repeated with some bewilderment.

"Yes, steamers. In Venice there – going up and down the Grand Canal, steamers in Venice! That I should live to hear of it! I shall not live to see it, Dieu soi louer! for I am not going back to Venice, – not till they carry me there in a box. It cannot be so very long now. I have no pains, it is true; my inside, which troubled me so long, is at peace; but that, they say, is a very bad sign. The doctor comes now to see me once a-week; he wonders how I live on. He looks round the garden every time he lands to see if there are any signs