“A SCENE OF LIGHT AND GLORY.”
It was April, the third springtime after the parting of the wedded
lovers, and to Eve it seemed as if many years had come and gone since
she looked upon her husband’s face. She had endured her life somehow,
a life of mornings and afternoons, of twilight and sunrise, of moons
that waxed and waned, of seasons that changed from hot to cold and
back again, an existence like a squirrel’s wheel, and having nothing
in common with that happy wedded life in which her eyes opened every
morning upon joy and love--the joy of knowing the beloved companion
near, the love which seemed ever near and ever growing.
Hetty had been a comfort to her in all that time, and had shown herself
so sympathetic that Eve had resolved never to part with her, except
to a husband; and, as yet, among Hetty’s numerous admirers there had
been no one whom she cared for as a future husband. So far Hetty was
heart-whole and devoted to her sister, more than ever devoted, alas!
now, when the red flag of phthisis flaunted upon Eve’s hollow cheeks,
and too surely marked the beginning of the end.
She had borne up bravely in those years of exile, making the best of
life in some of earth’s pleasantest places, courting cheerfulness for
her young sister’s sake, and never wearing her widowed heart upon her
sleeve. She had borne up bravely, though the enemy had been at work all
the time, and the fatal strain which had developed so early in Peggy,
showed itself in Eve by occasional illnesses, through which she battled
successfully, with the aid of much careful nursing by the skilled
Benson and the devoted Hetty. They had patched her up time after time,
as Benson told her compatriots in the courier’s room at the hotel, but
the day was coming when patching would no longer serve--when the frail
frame and the brave spirit must yield to the inevitable.
“Well, it’ll have to come to all of us, in our time,” said Benson,
brushing away a tear or two, “but it seems hard it should come to
her before she’s six and twenty. So pretty, too, and such a sweet
disposition. It’ll be a long time before I shall get a mistress I shall
like as well, though when I first took the place I thought I should
find it strange like, after being used only to titled people. But
there, we’re all human, and there ain’t much difference between a plain
country gentleman’s wife and a duchess when you’re putting a poultice
on her chest.”
* * * * *
In the bright April weather Eve and her sister came to Venice, the
city to which all Eve’s thoughts had been trending ever since she left
England, nearly three years before. She had always meant to go there,
always wished to look upon the scene of her brother’s untimely death,
and to kneel beside his nameless grave; but she had shrunk with an
indescribable dread from the accomplishment of her desire, her heart
aching even at the thought of the pain it must cost her to look upon
that place, which was associated with all her misery.
Hetty had talked about Venice very often, in her ignorance of all
painful associations, and Eve had put her off with promises. “Yes,
dear, I mean to go there, sooner or later;” and Hetty hung over
the coloured plan in Baedeker--the blue canal, with its curious
serpentine curve--and longed to be there with all the intensity which
pertains to the juvenile side of twenty. Venice, a name to conjure
with! She repeated those lines of Rogers’, the plain unvarnished
statement--“There is a glorious city by the sea; the sea is in the
broad, the narrow streets”--which brings that wonder-city before the
eye of the mind more vividly than all the fire and fervour of Byron, or
the word-painting of Dickens and Howells.
And now, now, in the beginning of the end, Eve knowing there was no
time to lose, the sisters were here in the spring sunset, their gondola
moving with the smooth, delicious motion which serves as a balm for
troubled spirits, a cure for all the agitations of life, moving in and
out of the labyrinthine rios, as the hansom cabman of Venice takes his
short cut to the Riva degli Schiavoni, and the comfortable hostelry
of Danieli, where at Benson’s advice rooms had been secured on the
entresol facing the lagoon, Benson professing familiarity with almost
every hotel in Europe. She had stayed at Danieli’s with her Duchess,
stayed there for a month, occupying the piano nobilissimo, in the most
palatial wing of that patchwork of palaces, where the traveller may
either find himself ushered into the mediæval splendour of a kingly
chamber, or may be conducted by a labyrinth of passages to a garret
looking out upon a slum that recalls St. Giles’s. The wise traveller,
of course, is he who gives Danieli ample notice of his coming, and for
him the noble floors are reserved.
The entresol was cosy rather than palatial; the rooms were spacious,
although low; and the windows opened directly upon all the life
and movement of this noisiest and gayest spot of Venice, curiously
suggestive of Margate in the Cockney season, save that it is
cosmopolitan instead of Cockney, and that instead of the Jew of
Houndsditch one may meet the Jew from Damascus or Cairo, from Ispahan
or Hungary, from Frankfort or Rome. Here all nations meet and mingle,
and all tongues are heard in the voices that mix with the tramp of
passing footsteps from morning till midnight. For people who want the
silence of the city by the sea, this entresol would be hardly the
choicest portion of Danieli’s rambling caravanserai; but to Hetty’s
mind those windows opened on a scene of enchantment.
The fishing-boats were coming in, their painted sails gaudier than
the sunset, and an Italian man-of-war was lying between the Riva and
the Island church yonder. How familiar that church of St. George the
Greater seemed to Hetty, and the Custom House, and the dome of Santa
Maria della Salute. She had known them all her life in pictures and
photographs--sham Canalettis, books of engravings--but the glory of
light and colour were as new to her dazzled eyes as if she had died
unawares and had come to life again in Paradise.
“Lovely, lovely; quite too lovely,” was all she could say, not having a
Ruskinesque vocabulary at her command.
When she looked round, appealing to her sister for sympathy in this new
delight, it was a shock to find the room empty.
She ran into the adjoining bedroom, where Benson was unpacking, and
then into her own little room further on; but there was no sign of Eve.
“She must have gone out for a stroll,” Hetty said ruefully. “She might
as well have told me she was going. She ought to know that I am dying
to see St. Mark’s.”
Hetty knew her sister’s dislike of all public rooms in hotels,
so she had very little hope of finding her in any of those
lounges--reading-room, hall, salon--which Signor Campi has provided
for his guests. There was no doubt in Hetty’s mind that Eve had gone
to look at St. Mark’s, before the twilight shadows began to veil
the splendour of the façade. Hetty went back to the window, and
amused herself with the perpetual movement on the quay, and on the
water, man-of-war, P. and O., fishing-boats, barges, gondolas moving
diagonally across the crimsoned water towards the crimson sky, light
and colour reflected upon all things, save where the dark cool shadows
accentuated that sunset splendour.