Blue Magic/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
UP ANCHOR
THE Norvells, with the exception of Fen, went ashore the next morning to wander for the last time in the Piazza, as they were to sail on the following day. Fen could tell them nothing of his expedition.
"I see now per fitly well why you couldn't tell me about it," he said to Sally.
He sat following in imagination the somber windings of a canal, when a soft "Buono giorno, caro mio," at his side, made, him open his eyes instantly.
"You're to sit quietly and not talk very much," said Siddereticus; "because you're tired after so much gondola-ing. What's that box on your lap?"
"What box?" asked Fen, looking down. "Where did it come from? It's not mine."
"It must be—it was in your lap. Come, don't tell me that you don't know your own boxes. What's inside?"
"I don't know," said Fen. "Really, I never saw it before. Do you think I'd better open it?"
"Of course," said Siddereticus; and Fen undid the little plaited grass string which fastened the box, and opened it.
Within, on soft cotton, lay two tiny glass vases. They seemed like soap-bubbles, they were so thin, so opalescent, faintly penciled with yellowish lines.
"Are they real?" whispered Fen; "could you touch them?"
Siddereticus took one out by its thread-like handle, and against the light it seemed almost to disappear, a filmy opal bubble.
"Where did the lovely, lovely things come from?'" asked Fen. "Whose are they?"
"Yours, apparently. It's very queer that you shouldn't remember your own things, I must say. Let's put them here, where the light makes such pretty colors in them. Now," he said, having arranged them satisfactorily, "tell me when you leave Venezia."
"We sail to-morrow afternoon," said Fen, with his eyes on the iridescent bubbles. "We're going around to Capri to pick up my Aunt Cynthia, and then we're going to stay at Naples for a while."
"What's your Aunt Cynthia like?" asked Siddereticus.
"I don't know," said Fen. "I only saw her when I was very little, before she went abroad, an' I don't remember. She 's quite old, though," he added.
Siddereticus, to whose mind the name of Cynthia had called a charming picture, immediately visualized, instead, an elder sister of Norvell, a middle-aged maiden lady, with eye-glasses and a determined air.
"An' there's something," Fen went on hastily and rather shyly, "that I did want to ask you about, because I think you'd know. My Auntie saw me ever so long ago, when I was quite little, you know; she—never saw me after I was—like this; an' I don't know whether she knows, or not. Do you—suppose she could like me, just the same?"
He stopped, with his cheeks flaming, and Siddereticus patted his hand.
"You needn't worry yourself about that, my Fen," he said; "if she's the right sort of an Auntie, it won't make a bit of difference—in fact, she'll love you all the more."
Early that afternoon a big yawl spread her sails, swinging out of the lagoon with a favorable wind, and the next day, at three o'clock, the yacht steamed out through the Porto di Malamocco into the Adriatic, and down the coast.
The weather continued fair, and the yacht encountered no storms as she passed again through the Strait of Otranto and rounded Cape Santa Maria di Leuca. Fen had carefully put the Venetian glasses on either side of Thoth, the three together making for him a sort of shrine. The voyage was uneventful, with the exception of some passing commotion caused by Larry's hurling himself against the corner of a berth one day during a slight blow and cutting a gash in his forehead. The excitement quickly subsided, however, and Larry's unconcealed pride in the bandage above his eye became tiresome.