‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘it’s only a Frenchman’s view and one can’t put much faith in them. I thought, if the will is corrupt, that is enough to damn you. Try to thwart the will, try to control it, try to reform it: I have tried. Faith without works is dead: that is the creed of the Roman Church and leads to indulgences. If one has faith it follows that one performs the acts of faith. They are nothing in themselves, have no value except to illustrate one’s faith. Why do them? Because one can’t help it. If the tree is good, so must the fruit be. And if evil? Need it be altogether evil? There’s a danger in arguing from analogy; metaphors conceal truth. But suppose the tree is evil, at any one time; would it be logical to say: “You’re a bad tree; if you don’t bear fruit you’ll still be bad, only not so bad”? The barren fig-tree was cursed for its barrenness, not for the quality of its fruit; it may have deliberately refrained from having figs, because it knew they would be bad, and it didn’t want to be known by its fruit. What I mean is, if the will is corrupt it will produce corrupt acts, and there is no virtue in refraining from any particular act, because everything you do will be wrong, wrong before you do it, wrong when you first think of it, wrong because you think it. But this man makes a distinction. To want to do wrong without doing it is concupiscence: it is in the nature of sin, but not sin. Isn’t this a quibble? And it’s cold comfort to be told that abstinence is concupiscence, and is in the nature of sin. I wish I could ask someone. After all, it’s an academic point: I can settle it which way I like, it commits me to nothing. However I argue it I shall still believe that the act does make a difference; if I wanted to throw myself off the Woolworth building, and didn’t, it would not be the same as if I wanted to and did.’
‘Well, he evidently means us to get out,’ said Lady Henry, looking doubtfully at the deserted campo.
Emilio was offering his arm.
Lord Henry strode ashore without availing himself of the hand-rail; but his wife and Lavinia accepted its aid in their transit. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you touch those fellows at your own risk.’
‘Nonsense, Henry,’ his wife protested. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, plague, pestilence, dirt, disease,’ Lord Henry answered.
‘My dear, does he look like it? He will outlive us all. Henry is secretly jealous of our gondolier,’ she said, turning to Lavinia. ‘Don’t you think him an Adonis?’
‘He is a genial-looking brigand,’ said her husband. ‘I was asking Miss Johnstone,’ Lady Henry remarked. ‘This is a matter for feminine eyes. I dote upon him.’ She turned her candid eyes upon her husband with an exquisite pretence of languor.
‘Well,’ he gently growled, ‘what about this palace? I don’t see it.’
‘Gondoliere,’ called Lady Henry, ‘Dove il palazzo Labia?’ She waved her hand to the grey buildings and the cloudy skies. Emilio climbed out of the boat.
‘See how helpful he is,’ she commented. ‘He knows exactly what I mean.’ Walking, Emilio always looked like an upright torpedo, as though he had been released by a mechanical contrivance and would knock down the first obstacle he met, or explode.
‘We were fortunate to get him,’ she continued. ‘We only hold him by a legal fiction; we couldn’t hire him, he has been too popular, poor fellow, all the summer, and no doubt fears the stilettos of his friends. I tried my utmost, Henry, didn’t I, to shake his resolution. I spoke in every tongue, but he was deaf to them all. So we re-engage him at the end of each ride, which does just as well, and salves his troublesome conscience. To-morrow, alas, we must go.’
They had gone down a passage and reached a door, the sullen solidity of which was impaired by the decay and neglect of centuries. Emilio pulled at the rusty bell and listened.
‘Do you think,’ Lavinia said suddenly, ‘you could ask him to be our gondolier, Mamma’s and mine, when you’ve finished with him? Just for two days; we leave on Friday.’
‘Why, of course,’ Lady Henry said.
She conducted the negotiation in her voluble broken Italian, pointed at Lavinia, pointed at herself, overrode some objection, made light of some scruple, and finally, out of the welter of questions and replies, drew forth, all raw as it were and quivering, Emilio’s consent. Over his fierceness he looked a little sheepish, as though the unusual rapidity of his thoughts had outstripped his expression and left it disconnected, drolly representing an earlier mood.
The door opened and they climbed to the high formal room where Antony and Cleopatra, disembarking, stare at Antony and Cleopatra feasting.
They had tea at Florian’s, under a stormy sky.
‘Don’t you think,’ Lady Henry de Winton said, ‘Miss Johnstone ought to be told some of those charming things Caroline said about her? Such a rain of dewdrops,’ she added turning to Lavinia. ‘I think we know you well enough.’
‘Perhaps Miss Johnstone doesn’t like hearing the truth about herself,’ Lord Henry suggested.
‘Oh, but such a truth—one could only mind not hearing it. First of all there were the general directions. Do you remember, Henry? We were not to shock her.’
‘Caroline thought you were very easily shocked,’ said Lord Henry, diffidently.
‘She had the Puritan conscience—the only one left in America; she might have stepped out of Mrs. Field’s drawing-room.’
‘Really, we must talk to Miss Johnstone, not about her,’ said Lord Henry, and they pulled up their chairs, turning radiant faces to Lavinia.
‘And not Puritan, my dear,’ Lord Henry put in. ‘Fastidious, choosy.’
‘I accept the amendment. Anyhow you would feel a stain like a wound. Then there were your friends.’
‘What about them?’ Lavinia asked.
‘Oh, they were a very compact body, but they agreed in nothing except in liking you. Each one had a pedestal for you, and thought the others did not value you enough. And they were very exacting. They had a special standard for you; if you so much as wobbled, the news was written, telephoned and cabled, in fact universally discussed.’
‘And universally denied,’ Lord Henry said.
‘Of course. But where others might steal a horse, I gathered, you mightn’t look over the hedge.’
‘That was only because,’ Lord Henry gently took her up, ‘you never wanted to look over the hedge.’
‘Do you recognize yourself in the portrait, Miss Johnstone?’ Lady Henry asked.
‘Oh, Caroline!’ Lavinia groaned.
‘There’s more to come,’ Lady Henry pursued. ‘You were inwardly simple, outwardly sophisticated. When you talked about your friends you were never malicious and yet never dull. You were a good judge of character; no one could take you in.’
‘She said,’ Lord Henry interpolated, with charming solicitude, ‘that no one would want to.’
But his wife saw a further meaning in this well-meant gloss and repudiated it.
‘Nonsense, Henry: anyone would be delighted to take Miss Johnstone in: she must be the target of all bad characters. Caroline was praising her intelligence. There, you shall pay for interrupting me by completing the catalogue of her virtues: a formidable task.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, sure of his ground this time, bending upon Lavinia his bright, soft look: ‘an easy one. Your poise was what your friends most admired. You took the heat out of controversies; you were a rallying point; you made other people feel at their best; you ingeminated peace.’
‘How eloquent he is!’ Lady Henry murmured, shaking her head.
‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘you were a great responsibility, the only one they had. They would never let you get married; they would rush to the altar and forbid the banns. You were, you were,’ he concluded lamely, ‘their criterion of respectability: they couldn’t afford to lose you.’