Just two years after the sudden close of Mr. Rutherford's retreat
there was a quiet wedding in Father Hammond's chapel--a bride without
bridesmaids, a marriage without music, a bride in a pale grey gown and
a black hat, with just a sprinkling of the Disbrowe clan to keep her in
countenance. Three stately aunts, Lady Okehampton being by far the most
human of the three, and their three noble husbands, with Lady Susan
Amphlett, vivacious as ever, and immensely pleased with her friend.
From a conversational point of view she had been living upon this
marriage all through the little season of November fog and small
dinner-parties at restaurants or at home. She knew so much more than
anybody else, and what she knew was what everybody wanted to know. She
discussed the subject at Ritz's, at Claridge's, at the Savoy, at the
Carlton, and seemed to have something fresh to say at each place of
entertainment. There was more variety in her information than even in
the _hors d'oeuvres_, which rise in a crescendo of novelty in unison
with the newness of the hotel.
People wondered they had not married sooner, since, of course,
everybody knew it must end in marriage.
Susie shrugged her pretty shoulders, and flashed her diamond necklace
at the company.
"The sweet thing is _exaltée_. She is one of Francis Symeon's flock;
and she thought respect for her husband obliged her to wait two years.
She only left off her mourning last week."
"But considering that she was carrying on with Rutherford years before
Provana's death?"
"You none of you understand her. Their friendship was purely platonic.
She and I were like sisters, and I was in and out of her house just as
Claude was. There never was a more innocent attachment. I used to call
them Paul and Virginia."
"I should think Paolo and Francesca would be more like it," murmured
one of the company.
Susie shook her fan at him.
"You men will never believe in a virtuous friendship. However, there
they are--absolutely devoted to each other. They will be the happiest
couple in London, and they mean to entertain a great deal."
"Then I hope they are on the look-out for a pearl among chefs. People
won't go to Portland Place to eat second-rate dinners."
"Provana's dinners were admirable, and his wines the finest in London."
Then there came the question of settlements. How much of her millions
had Mrs. Provana settled upon Rutherford?
"I don't think there has been any settlement."
"The more fool he," muttered a matter-of-fact guardsman. "What's the
use of marrying a rich woman if you don't get some of the stuff?"
"Don't I tell you they are like Paul and Virginia?" said Susie.
* * * * *
The Provana murder had died out long before this as a source of
interest and wonder. It had flourished and faded like a successful
novel, or a play that takes the town by storm one year and is forgotten
the year after. The Provana mystery had gone to the dust-heap of old
things. Slowly and gradually people had resigned themselves to the
knowledge that this murder must take its place among the long list of
crimes that are never to be punished by the law.
Romantic people clung to their private solutions of the tragical
enigma. These were as sure of the identity of the murderer as if they
had seen him red-handed. The quiet marriage in the Roman Catholic
chapel revived the interest in the half-forgotten crime, and Lady Susan
had the additional kudos of a close association with the event.
"Vera and I were together at Lady Fulham's ball within two or three
hours of that poor fellow's death," she told her friends at a Savoy
supper-table. "I never saw her look so lovely, in one of her mermaid
frocks, and a necklace and girdle of single diamonds that flashed like
water-drops. Other people's jewels looked vulgar compared with hers.
She was in wonderful spirits, stayed late, and danced all the after
supper waltzes. She was fey."
"Rutherford was there, of course?" said someone.
"Of course," echoed Susan; "why shouldn't he be there? Everybody was
there."
"But everybody couldn't waltz or sit out with Madame Provana all the
evening, as I heard he did," remarked a middle-aged matron, fixing
Susan with her long-handled eyeglass.
"Why shouldn't they waltz? They are cousins, and have always been
pals, and they waltz divinely. To watch them is to understand what
Shakespeare meant by the poetry of motion. Everything Vera does is a
poem. Every frock she wears shows that she is a poet's daughter. And
now they are married, and are going to be utterly happy," concluded
Susie with conviction.
The world in general does not relish that idea of idyllic
happiness--especially in the case of multi-millionaires. It is
consoling--when one is not a millionaire--to think of some small
counterbalance to that overweening good luck, some little rift within
the lute.
A cynic, as cold and sour as the aspic he was eating, shrugged his
shoulders.
"If I had a daughter I was fond of, I don't think I would trust the
chances of her happiness to Claude Rutherford," he said quietly.
"Claude is quite adorable," said a fourteen-stone widow, whose opulent
shoulders and triple necklaces had been the central point of the public
gaze at the theatre that evening.
"Much too adorable to make one woman happy. A man of that kind has to
spread himself. It must be diffused light, not the concentrated glow
of the domestic hearth," said the cynic, smiling at the bubbles in his
glass.
Everybody found something to say about Vera and her husband. Certainly
their behaviour since Provana's death had been exemplary. They had
never been seen about together, at home or abroad. The house in
Portland Place had been closed, and the widow had lived in Italy,
a recluse, seeing no one. Half the time had been spent by Claude
Rutherford in Africa, hunting big game with a famous sportsman. The
other half in well-known studios in Antwerp and Paris. He had thrown
off his lazy, dilettante habits, and had gone in for art with a curious
renewal of energy. The man was altered somehow. His old acquaintance
discovered a change in him: a change for the better, most likely,
though they did not all think so.
And now he had attained the summit of mortal bliss, as possible to a
man of nine-and-thirty, who had wasted the morning of life. He had won
a lovely woman whom he was supposed to adore, and whose wealth ought to
be inexhaustible.
"However hard he tries, I don't see how he can run through such a
fortune as that," his friends said.
"That kind of quiet, unpretentious man has often a marvellous faculty
for getting rid of money," said another; "it oozes out of his pockets
without the labour of spending. Rutherford is sure to gamble. A man of
that temperament is too idle to find excitement for himself. He wants
it ready-made--at the baccarat table, or on the turf."
"Well, it will last him a few years, at the worst, and then he can go
into the Charter-house."
The idea of Claude Rutherford going to bed at ten o'clock in the
Charter-house made everybody laugh.
* * * * *
The long interval of mourning and probation, of melancholy solitude on
Vera's part, and of forced occupation on Claude's, was over: and they
two, who in thought and feeling had been long one, were now united in
that closer bond which only death or sin can sever. In the intensity of
that union it seemed to them as if they had never lived asunder, as if
all of their existence that had gone before were no more than a long,
dull dream, the grey monotony of life that was less than life, hard and
mechanical even in its so-called pleasures.
"I never lived till now," she told him, when she was folded to his
heart, in their sumptuous alcove in the great room in Venice, in an
hotel that had been a palace, an alcove surrounded with a balustrade, a
bed that had been made for a king. "I never lived till now--for now I
know that nothing can part us. We belong to each other till death."
"If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy," he murmured in a
low, impassioned voice that soothed her like music.
"And the past is dead," she whispered.
"The past is dead."
The voice that echoed her words had changed.
The winter moonlight sent a flood of cold light across the shining
floor, and the glow of burning logs on the hearth glimmered redly under
the sculptured arch of the Byzantine fireplace. It was a wonderful room
in a wonderful city. Vera had never been in Venice till this night,
when she stepped from the station quay into the black boat that was to
bring them to the hotel, man and maid and luggage following in a second
gondola. To most travellers so arriving, Venice must needs seem a dream
city; but to Vera all life had been a dream since she had stood before
the altar and heard Father Hammond's grave voice pronounce the words
that made her Claude's wife.
She had chosen Venice for their honeymoon, because it was the one
famous city in her beloved Italy in which she had never been with
Provana.
"It will be all new and strange," she told Claude, and then came the
unspoken thought. "He will not be there."
He had been with her in Rome, almost an inseparable companion, until
she had grown accustomed to the thought that he must be with her
always, wherever she went, an inseparable shadow; but with her marriage
the bond that held her to the past was broken, the shadow was lifted.
She was young again; young and thoughtless, living in the exquisite
hour, almost as happy as she had been when she was an impulsive,
light-hearted child of eleven, leaping on to her cousin's knee, and
nestling with her arms round his neck, while they watched the waves
racing towards the rock where they were sitting, she rather hoping that
the waters would rise round them and swallow them. That blue brightness
could hardly mean death. They would only become part of the sea--merman
and mermaid, children of the ocean. How much better than to return to
the dull lodgings, and Lidcott's harsh dominion!
That solitude of two in the loveliest city in Europe seemed altogether
of the stuff that dreams are made of. They kept no count of the days
and hours. They made no plan for to-morrow. They wandered along the
_calle_, and in and out of the churches, in a desultory and casual
way, looking at pictures and statues without any precise knowledge
of what they were seeing--only a dreamy delight in things that were
beautiful themselves, and which awakened ideas of beauty. They spent
idle days in their gondola going from island to island, musing among
the historic arches of Torcello, or sauntering along the sands of
the Lido. The winter was mild even in England, and here soft air and
sunshine suggested April rather than December. It was a delicious
world, and in the seclusion of a gondola, or in the half-light of a
church, they seemed to have this lovely world all to themselves. There
were very few strangers in Venice at this season, and the residents had
something more to do than to wander about the narrow _calle_, or loiter
and look at things in the churches, or the Doge's Palace. These two
were learning Venice by heart in those leisurely saunterings, a little
listless sometimes, as of people whose lives had come to a dead stop.
They never talked of the past, or only of that remote past when Vera
was a child, the time of childish happiness by the blue waves and dark
cliffs of North Devon. They talked very little of the future. Their
talk was of themselves, and of their love. They read Byron and Shelley
and Browning, and De Musset. They drank deep of the poetry that Venice
had inspired, until every stone in the City of Dreams seemed enchanted,
and every noble old mansion, given over perhaps now to commerce,
glass-blowers, and dealers in bric-à-brac, seemed a fairy palace.
They drained the cup of life and love. Claude forgot that he had ever
thought of the woollen gown and the hempen girdle; Vera forgot that
she had ever seen him, haggard and hollow-eyed, crouching over the
smouldering olive logs in the monastery on the Roman hill.
Early on their wedding journey, leaning against the side of the boat,
hand locked in hand, they had sworn to each other that all the past
should be forgotten. Come what, come might, in unknown Fate, they would
never remember.
And now they were going back to London in the gay spring season, and
Lady Susan Amphlett had another innings. It was delicious to be moving
about in a world where everybody wanted to know things that only she
could tell them.
"And are they really going to live in the house in Portland Place?"
"Really, really. Where could they get such rooms, such air and space?
And that old Italian furniture is priceless. There is nothing better
in the Doria Palace. It took the Provana family more than a century to
collect it--even with their wealth."
"Well, when I saw the painters at work outside I thought the house
must have been sold. This world seems full of strange people. How Vera
can reconcile herself to life in that house passes my comprehension.
I could understand her keeping the furniture; but to live inside
those four walls. I should fancy they were closing in upon me, like a
mediæval torture chamber."
"Vera is all poetry and imagination, but she is not morbid."
"Vera knows that we are in the midst of the unseen, and that our dead
are always near us," said a thrilling voice, and Lady Fanny Ransom's
dark eyes flashed across the table. "The house can make no difference
to her. If she loved her first husband she has not lost him."
"Nice for her, but not so pleasant for her second," murmured a
matter-of-fact K.C.
"She was utterly devoted to poor Provana," protested Susie, "but it was
the reverent looking-up kind of love that an innocent girl feels for
a man old enough to be her father. She has told me the story of their
courtship--so sweet--like Paul and Virginia."
"A middle-aged Paul! I thought Rutherford was the hero of the Paul and
Virginia chapter of her history."
"Oh, well, they were little lovers as children, and Vera and Claude are
the most ideal couple that ever the world has seen. They are going to
entertain in a sumptuous style. Their house will be the most popular in
London."
"In spite of its being the scene of an unsolved mystery and
undiscovered crime. That's the worst of it," said sour middle-age in a
garnet necklace. "For my part, I could never sleep a wink in that awful
house."
"Ah, but you'll be able to eat and drink in it," remarked Mr.
Hortentius, K.C., dryly. "We shall all dine there, if the dinners are
as good as they were in poor Provana's time."
Poor Provana! That was his epitaph in the world. On the marble tomb at
San Marco, to which the dead man had been carried--in remembrance of a
desire expressed in those distant days when he and Vera wandered in the
olive woods--there was nothing but his name, and one word: "Re-united."
Vera had been too ill and too much under the dominion of Lady
Okehampton to make the dismal journey with her dead; but she had gone
from Rome to San Marco, and had spent a melancholy hour in the secluded
corner where the cypress cast its long shadow on Guilia's tomb.
She had stood by the tomb in a kind of stupor, hardly conscious of
the present, lost in a long dream of the past, living again through
those bright April days, with father and daughter, and hearing again
the ineffable tenderness in Mario Provana's voice, as he talked to his
dying child. What an abyss of time since those sad, sweet days! And now
there was nothing left but a name--
MARIO PROVANA
--here, and in certain hospitals in London and Rome, where there were
wards or beds established in memory of Mario Provana.