“BOTH TOGETHER, HE HER GOD, SHE HIS IDOL.”
Pale, quiet, resolute, with her mind made up as to what she had to
do, Eve Vansittart crossed the Piazzetta towards Florian’s Caffè, and
slowly, very slowly, passed in front of the windows, looking at the
loungers seated here and there at the marble tables, and wondering
whether this was the scene of her brother’s fate. She had not been
told the name of the caffè. She only knew that it was at Venice, in
Carnival time, and at a crowded caffè that the fatal encounter had
happened.
She passed Florian’s, and a door or two further on was assailed by a
photographer, who wanted to sell her views of the city at five francs
a dozen, and who would not believe that she could exist without them.
She looked at him absently for a minute or two while he showed his
views, expatiating upon their beauty and cheapness, and after that
thoughtful pause went into his shop, seated herself, and turned over
the leaves of an album of specimen photographs, choosing a dozen at
random--“this--and this--and this”--without looking at them.
“Have you had this shop long?” she asked.
“Fifteen years.”
“Then you must remember something that happened in a caffè in the
Piazza--Florian’s, most likely--seven years ago. It was on a Shrove
Tuesday, late at night. A young man was killed, accidentally, in a
scuffle. Do you remember?”
The photographer shrugged his shoulders.
“That is a thing that might happen any year at Carnival time,” he said
lightly. “There is much excitement. Our people are good-natured, very
good-natured, but they are hot-tempered, and a blow is quickly given,
even a blow that may prove fatal. I cannot say that I remember any
particular case.”
“The man who was killed was an Englishman, and the man who killed him
was an Englishman.”
“Strange,” said the photographer. “The English are generally cool and
collected--a serious nation. Had it been an American I should be less
surprised. The Americans are more like us. There is more quicksilver in
their blood.”
“Cannot you remember now? An Englishman, a gentleman, stabbed by an
English gentleman,” urged Eve. “Surely such things do not happen every
day?”
“Every day? No, Signora. But in Carnival time one is prepared for
strange things happening. I begin to recall the circumstance, but not
very clearly. A young Englishman stabbed with a dagger that had been
bought over the way a short time before. He had been drinking, and was
jealous of a young woman who was present. He attacked his compatriot
with savage violence. Yes, I recall the affair more clearly now. There
were those present who said he brought his fate upon himself by his
brutality. The man who stabbed him made a bolt of it, on a hint from
a bystander--ran across the Piazzetta, jumped into the water, and
swam for his life. No one in Venice ever knew what became of him. He
must have been picked up by a gondola, and must have got away by the
railroad. Who knows? He may have got ashore on the mainland, and made
his way to Mestre, so as to avoid the railway station here, where the
police might be on the watch for him. Anyhow, he got away. He had
courage, quickness, his wits well about him.”
“It was at Florian’s that this happened?” asked Eve.
“Yes, at Florian’s--where else? There is no caffè in Venice equal to
Florian’s.”
That was all. She paid for her photographs and went back to Florian’s,
and peered in at the bright, pretty salons, where the Italians were
lounging over their coffee, with here and there a group playing
dominoes, and where tourists--English, American, German--were enjoying
themselves more noisily. She wondered in which of those salons the
tragedy had been acted. Was the stain of her brother’s blood on the
floor ineffaceable, like Rizzio’s in the fatal room at Holyrood? She
loitered for a few minutes, looking in through the open doors and
windows shudderingly; and seeing she was observed, she moved quickly
away, and presently was being followed across the piazza by a Venetian
seeker of _bonnes fortunes_, she herself happily unconscious of the
fact.
She looked at the shops in the Procuratie Vecchie, and was pestered by
the touting shopkeepers after their Venetian manner. She looked in at
all those Eastern toys and Italian gewgaws, and jewellery which has
here and there a suggestion of Birmingham.
“Do you sell daggers?” she asked a black-eyed youth, who had entreated
her earnestly to ascend to the show-room above, assuring her that the
“to look costs nothing.”
Her question startled him. “Daggers, yes, assuredly. Was it a jewelled
dagger for her hair that the Signora desired? He had of the most
magnificent.”
No. She wanted no dagger, only to know whether he sold them, real
daggers, strong enough to wound fatally.
He showed her a whole armoury of Moorish knives, any one of which
looked as if it might be deadly.
“Do you remember a young Englishman being killed with such a dagger as
this?” she said, pointing to one of the deadliest, “by accident, in
Carnival time?”
He remembered, or affected to remember, nothing.
Leaving his shop, after buying half a dozen bead necklaces for
civility, Eve found herself face to face with her Venetian admirer,
upon whom she turned so dark a frown as to repel even that practised
Lothario. She hurried back to Danieli’s, and arrived there flushed and
breathless, and far too much exhausted to do justice to the simple
little dinner of clear soup and roast chicken which Benson had ordered,
a dinner served in her own sitting-room, which privilege of dining
alone was Eve’s only extravagance in her travels.
Hetty questioned her sister closely, and reproached her for unkindness
in going out unaccompanied; but Eve gave her no explanation of that
excursion.
“You are not strong enough to walk about alone, dear,” the sister said
tenderly. “You want a giraffe like me to give you an arm.” This was
Hetty’s way of alluding to the tall slim figure which had been so much
admired on the tennis courts of St. Moritz and Maloja.
Eve engaged a gondola next morning. It was to be her own gondola,
and the gondolier was to give allegiance to no one else, so long as
Mrs. Vansittart remained in Venice. She set out alone in her gondola
directly after breakfast, in spite of Hetty’s remonstrances.
“I have some business in Venice that I must keep to myself, Hetty. It
will be the greatest kindness in you to ask no questions.”
“You are full of mysteries,” said Hetty, “but I won’t tease you. Only
take care of yourself, dearest, and don’t be unhappy about anything,
for the sake of the sisters who idolize you.”
Eve kissed her, and went away without another word. Hetty marched
about all the morning with Benson, who showed her St. Mark’s and the
pigeons, and the Doge’s Palace, whisking her rapidly through all the
picture-rooms, but not letting her off a single dark cell on either
side the Bridge of Sighs.
* * * * *
Eve’s first visit was to the chief office of the Venetian police, where
she found an obliging functionary, who, at her desire, produced the
record of the unknown Englishman’s death.
The story was bald and brief. A scuffle, ending in a fatal wound from a
dagger. The man who used the dagger had escaped. The weapon was in the
possession of the police.
“Was every means taken to find the man who killed him?” Eve asked.
“Every means, although there was no extra pressure put upon us. Nobody
came forward to identify the victim or to claim the body. He must have
been a waif and stray; his name, Smith, is one of the commonest English
names, I am told, and it may have been an assumed name in his case. He
was a fine young fellow, but showed marks of having lived recklessly
and drunk hard. The lines in his face were the lines that dissipated
habits leave on young faces. It was a sad business. Has the Signora any
personal interest in this unfortunate gentleman?”
“Yes, he was my relation. I have come to Venice on purpose to find his
grave.”
“That will be difficult, I fear. He belonged to nobody. His bones will
have been mingled with other bones in the public grave ere now.”
“Oh, that is hard,” said Eve, in a broken voice. “A pauper’s grave. He
was a gentleman by birth and education. There were those in his own
country who would have starved rather than let him lie in a nameless
grave.”
The official shrugged his shoulders with the true philosophical shrug.
“Does the Signora really think that it matters whether we have as grand
a tomb as Titian or lie nameless and forgotten in some quiet corner?
For my part, the finest monument that was ever set up would not console
me for a short life. When these bones of mine are only aches and pains,
and can carry me about no longer, away with them to the crematorium.
The Signora will pardon me for venturing to state my own views, and
if she desires it I will try to discover the exact circumstances of
the Englishman’s burial. It is possible that there may have been some
one interested in his last resting-place, and the grave may have been
bought. There was a young Venetian, the girl who caused the quarrel,
who seems to have been attached to him. She may have done something. If
the Signora will be good enough to wait till to-morrow I may be able to
furnish her with better information.”
Eve thanked him for his polite interest, and promised to recompense him
for any trouble he might take on her behalf.
She received a letter from him the next morning.
“The grave is the last in the avenue leading due west by the side of
the south wall in the cemetery at San Michele. There is a wooden cross,
and the name Smith. The grave was bought and the cross erected at the
expense of the Venetian girl.”
Eve’s gondola took her to the sea-girt burial-place in the morning
sunshine. She carried a basket of roses and narcissus, to lay upon her
brother’s grave, and her mind was full of the hour when she saw him for
the last time. How near in its distinctness of detail, of sensation
even! how far in that sense of remoteness which made her feel as if
she were looking across a gulf of death and time to another life! Was
that really herself--that impetuous girl, whose arms had clung round
her brother’s neck in the agony of parting, and who had never known any
other love?
To-day there was a conflict of feeling. There was the thought of the
man whose crime had been the crime of a moment, whose punishment was
the punishment of a lifetime.
“I know that he loved me,” she told herself. “I know that I was
necessary to his happiness, and yet I sent him away from me. Could I do
otherwise? No. The man who killed my brother could not be my husband, I
knowing what he had done. Ah, as long as I did not know, what a happy
woman I was! And I might have lived happy in my ignorance to the end
but for my own fault.”
And then with bitterest smile she said aloud--
“Ah, Fatima, Fatima, how dearly you have paid for the turning of the
key!”
She found San Michele, the quiet island of the dead, sleeping in the
soft haze of morning on the bosom of the lagune. A little way off,
the chimneys of Murano were tarnishing the clear Italian sky with
their smoke; the barges were loading and unloading; the glass-makers
were passing to and fro--women and girls flip-flopping over the damp
stones in their quarter-less shoes! the children and the beggars were
sprawling in the sun. There the stir and variety of life: here the
silence and the sameness of death.
She found her brother’s grave, and the monument which Fiordelisa and
her aunt had set up in his honour. The grave was a mound on which the
grass grew tall and rank, as it grows at Torcello, above the ruins of
the mother city. The monument--poor tribute of faithful poverty--was
a wooden cross painted black, with an inscription in white lettering,
rudely done:--
SIR SMIZZ
MORTO A VENEZIA,
MARTEDI-GRASSO, 1885.
Below this brief description were seven of those conventional
figures--in shape like a chandelier-drop--which often ornament the
funeral drapery that marks the house of death. These chandelier-drops,
painted white on the black ground of the cross, represented tears. They
were seven, the mystic number, sacred to every Catholic mind.
These seven tears--seven heart-wounds--were all the epitaph Lisa could
give to her lover. A wreath of immortelles, black with the blackness of
years, hung upon the cross. It dropped into atoms as Eve touched it,
was blown away upon the salt sea wind, vanishing as if it had been the
spectral form of a wreath rather than the thing itself.
Eve sank on her knees in the hollow between two graves, and abandoned
herself to a long ecstasy of supplication, praying not for the dead, at
peace beneath that green mound where the grasshoppers were chirping,
and the swift lizards gliding in and out,--not for the dead, but for
the man who killed him, for the conscience-burdened wanderer, under
torrid suns, far from peace, and home, and all the pleasures and
comforts of civilization, seeking forgetfulness in the arid desert, in
the fever-haunted swamp, among savage beasts and savage men, going with
his life in his hand, lying down to sleep at the end of a weary day,
with the knowledge that if his camp-fires were not watched he might
wake to find himself face to face with a lion. Oh, what a life for him
to lead, for him whose days had been spent so pleasantly in the busy
idleness of a man whose only occupation is the care of a small landed
estate, and whose only notion of hard work is the early rising in the
season of cub-hunting, or the strenuous pleasures of salmon-fishing
beyond the Scottish border.
When her prayer was done--her prayer that her beloved might be
sheltered and guarded by a Power which guides the forces of Nature,
and bridles the neck of the lion, and can disperse the pestilence with
a breath--prayer is a dead letter for those who believe less than
this--Eve sat upon the grass, under her Italian umbrella, the red
umbrella which all the peasants use as shelter from sun and rain, and
abandoned herself to thoughts of the wanderer.
She knew more of his wanderings than she had hoped to know when Sophy’s
letter from Fernhurst first told her that he was travelling with a
friend in the Mashona country; thanks to an occasional letter from
his own pen which appeared in the _Field_, and over which his wife
hung with breathless interest, and read and re-read, returning to it
again and again long after the date of publication, as she returned
to _Hamlet_ or “In Memoriam.” Week after week she searched the paper
eagerly for any new letter, or any stray paragraph giving news of the
wanderer; but the letters appeared at long intervals, and the last was
nearly three months old. He had turned his face homeward, he said,
in that last letter. Her heart thrilled at the thought that he might
have returned ere now, that he might be at Merewood perhaps, in the
rooms where they had lived together, in the garden which was once
their earthly Paradise, in which she had watched the growth of every
flowering shrub, and counted every rose, in that mild Hampshire where
roses flourish almost as abundantly as in balmy Devon. She thought of
the tulip tree she had planted on their favourite lawn, he standing
beside her as she bent to her work, laughingly prophetic of the day
when they should sit on a rustic bench together under the spreading
branches of that sapling of to-day, to accept the congratulations of
garden-party guests upon their golden wedding.
“‘We must really go and speak to the old people,’ some pert young
visitor would say to a perter granddaughter of the house, ‘only one
hardly knows what to say to people of that prodigious age.’”
Eve remembered her feeling of vague wonder what it was like to be old,
whilst Vansittart jestingly forecast the future.
Well, all speculation of that kind was at an end now. She would never
know what it was like.
“Those the Gods love die young,” she repeated to herself, dreamily.
“I would not mind dying--any more than Peggy minded, happy-souled
Peggy--if I could but see him before I die. There could be no harm in
my seeing him--just at the end--no treason to my flesh and blood lying
here.”
She laid her wasted cheek upon the mound, and let her tears mix with
the last lingering dew on the long grass. She wanted to be loyal to her
dead; but her heart yearned with a sick yearning for one touch from the
hand of the living, for one look from the eyes that would look only
love. Love, and pardon, and fond regret.
It was a fortnight after that morning in the cemetery at San Michele,
that in poring over her _Field_ Eve came upon a two-line paragraph at
the bottom of a column, a most obscure little paragraph--side by side
with one of those little anecdotes of intensest human interest which
chill one at the end by the fatal symbol, “Advt.”--a tiny scrap of
news which any but the most searching reader would have been likely to
overlook.
“Among the passengers on board the _City of Zanzibar_, which left Cape
Town on the 3rd inst., for Alexandria and Brindisi, were Mr. Murthwait
and Mr. Vansittart, returning from a hunting expedition to Lobengula’s
country.”
Eve sent for her doctor that evening, the English doctor who had
attended her at St. Moritz in January and February, and who was now
taking a semi-professional holiday in Venice--willing to see old
patients who might have drifted to the city in the sea, but not
desiring new ones.
She submitted patiently to the necessary auscultation, while her sister
stood by, pale and breathless, waiting to hear the words of doom.
The doctor’s face, when he laid down the stethoscope, was grave even
to sorrowfulness. He had been warmly interested in this case in the
winter, had hoped against hope.
“Am I worse than I was in February?” Eve asked quietly.
“I am very sorry to have to say it--yes, you are worse.”
“And you think badly of my case? You think it quite hopeless?”
“There is no such thing as hopelessness,” said the doctor, responding
to an appealing look from Hetty. “You are so young--have such a
fine constitution, and even after what you told me of your family
history--who knows?--there is always a chance.”
“Yes, there was a chance for my youngest sister,” answered Eve, with a
faint smile. “Peggy’s chance lasted six months.”
“If there is anything you want to settle--any business matter, such as
the disposal of property, which makes your mind uneasy--it is always
well to set such anxieties at rest,” answered the doctor, soothingly.
“Yes, I must see to that. My settlement gives me the right to dispose
of my property--the property my husband gave me. I had none of my own.
But it is not of that I am thinking. Oh, doctor, be frank with me. I
have a reason for wanting to know. Do you think that I am dying?”
“Alas, dear lady! I cannot promise you many years of life.”
“Or many months? Or many weeks? Oh, doctor, don’t think I am afraid of
the truth. I am not one of those consumptives who deceive themselves. I
have no spurious hopes--perhaps because I do not set a great value on
life. Only there is some one I want to see before I die.”
“Send for him, then,” said the doctor, divining that the some one was
her husband. “Send for him, and set your mind at rest.”
“I will,” she answered resolutely, and before the doctor had left her
half an hour she had written and despatched her telegram--
“John Vansittart, Steamer _City of Zanzibar_, Poste Restante,
Brindisi.--I am at Venice, and would give much to see you on your way
home.--Eve.--Danieli’s.”
The windows of Mrs. Vansittart’s salon on the entresol at Danieli’s
opened upon a balcony--a balcony shaded and sheltered by a striped
awning, under which Eve loved to sit at her ease, nestling among the
cushions which Hetty arranged for her, on days when, in her own words,
she felt hardly equal to the gondola. There had been many days since
the despatch of that message to Brindisi when Eve had felt unequal to
the gondola, and Hetty had by this time exhausted all the sights of
Venice under the chaperonage of Benson--who gave herself as many airs
as if she had been Ruskin--and had yawned as heartily in the Accademia
as ever she had yawned in the National Gallery. She had wearied of
Titian and Tintoretto. She had tried her hardest to admire Carpaccio,
and to pin her mind to her limp little piratical edition of the “Stones
of Venice.” She thought of Ruskin religiously every day as she tripped
past Figtree Corner. More fondly, perhaps, did she affect the shops
in the Merceria, and all those wonderful little streets which to the
Cockney of mature years recall all that was most precious--that is to
say, most characteristic of the little industries and little trades
of a great city--in the vanishing alleys and paved courts between
Leicester Square and Oxford Street. Here there was always something
to interest the girl from Sussex; and the Rialto, market and bridge,
afforded never-failing pleasure. Thus the gondolier had an easy time of
it, and slept away the brightening hours, and basked in the sun, and
fattened on golden messes of polenta.
It was quite true that Eve felt less capable of exertion--even that
slight effort of going downstairs and stepping from Danieli’s doorstep
into a gondola--than when first she came to Venice; but she had
another and stronger reason for preferring her cushioned nest on the
balcony to the Lido or the lagunes, lovely as those smooth waters
were in the lovely May weather. She was waiting for the result of her
telegram, she was watching for the coming of her husband. He would
come to her. On that question she had no fear. If he lived to land
at Brindisi and to receive her message, he would come to Venice. She
would see him, and forgive, and be forgiven, before she died. Forgive
him; forgive the wrong done to another? For her own part there had
never been anything less than pardon in her mind. She had made every
excuse that love can make--love, the special pleader--the infallible
advocate for a criminal at the court of a woman’s conscience. She had
excused his crime until it was no crime; but she had been firm in her
conviction that she could not live with the man who killed her brother.
Looking back now at the years of a double exile there was no wavering
in her mind, no regret for what she had done. She felt only gratitude
to Providence who had shortened the lonely years, and brought the end
so near.
Three weeks of watching and waiting passed like a slow pensive dream--a
dream of blue water--and lounging gondoliers--and flower-girls with
baskets of ragged pink peonies, and the shriek and whistle of the
steamer for the Lido, and the passing of many footsteps, and sound
of many voices, grey-coated tourists, American and British, for ever
coming and going, so light-hearted, so light-minded, so noisy, that
one might think care and sorrow had no part in their lives or in their
memories. To Eve, dwelling for ever on the memory of the life which
had been, on the thought of the parting which was to be, all that
tumultuous movement and gaiety seemed a thing of wonder.
“How happy they all are!” she said. “What a happy world it seems--for
other people.”
“Ah, but you see people must wear their happy side outermost,” answered
Hetty, “and I dare say even Americans know what care means, though they
always seem wallowing in money and new clothes. I wish you would come
down to the hall to-night, and hear the little concert we have every
evening, and see my favourite young lady from Boston. She has all her
frocks from Paris, and her waist is under nineteen inches. Yet she
eats! Ah, what a privilege to be able to eat as much as she does, and
yet keep one’s waist under nineteen inches!”
The day had been almost oppressively warm, and the fishing-boats were
coming home through a sea of molten gold in the unspeakable splendour
of a Venetian sunset, when May has breathed the first breath of summer
heat over land and water. Eve had been sitting in the balcony all day
reading those little books of Howells’ and his contemporaries, which
seem especially invented for the traveller in fair countries, light,
portable, dainty to touch and gracious to look upon, and eminently
proper. She had read, and dreamed her waking dreams, and dozed a good
deal at intervals--for her nights now were sadly broken, and sadly
wakeful--quite as bad as poor Miss Margaret’s nights, as Benson told
her sympathetically. Miss Margaret? Who was Miss Margaret? And then Eve
remembered how the respectful Benson had insisted on calling Peggy by a
name which no other lips had ever addressed to her.
Benson was an admirable nurse, wakeful, watchful, really attached to
her mistress; but she was just a shade too business-like, and too
much inclined to look upon Eve as a case rather than an individual.
She watched the progress of decay with a ghoulish gusto, and told her
mistress more about former patients than it was cheering for an invalid
to know.
To-day, after the weariness of the night, and the long, long hours
between sunrise and the breakfast hour of civilization, Eve’s fitful
slumbers were sound and deep, deeper than dreamland, deep as the dark
abyss of unconsciousness. She had been falling into this gulf now and
again all day, falling suddenly from her book or her daydream into that
black pit of sleep.
A cooler breeze sprang up with the sinking of the sun, and the water
between the Riva and the island church was stirred into bolder ripples
as the dark gondolas stood sharply out against the reddening light. The
salt breath of the Adriatic was blowing across the sandy bar yonder
with revivifying freshness. Eve rose from her nest of pillows in the
low canvas chair, and stood leaning against the balcony, looking at
the animated scene. There was a paper lantern twinkling here and there
with a pale fantastic light, in sickly contrast to that blaze of sunset
colour, and as the crimson faded in the low western sky the little
earthly lights brightened and grew bold, and there came the sound of
that light music which Venetians love, music that seems only a natural
accompaniment to the ripple of the incoming tide.
“How bright and gay it all looks!” said Eve. “Is there anything on
earth to equal Venice? Oh, how strange that I should love this city so
well!” she murmured, in self-reproach, remembering the purpose that had
brought her there.
The charm of the city had crept upon her unawares. She was glad to live
there, glad that she was to die there.
She looked towards the bridge by the Doge’s Palace, and saw a man
walking quickly down the steps--a bearded man, with a brown skin and a
weather-beaten look. He was coming quickly towards the hotel; he was
looking up at the windows, scanning the wide frontage with a sweeping
glance, now high, now low, till his eyes lighted on the balcony where
she stood, lighted on herself, and never unfixed their gaze.
Changed as he was, she had known him from the first instant. She had
known him when he appeared at the top of the steps for John Vansittart
and no other. There was something in his walk, something in the
carriage of his head, something which to the eyes of love seemed to
distinguish him from all the rest of the world--characteristics that
might have been invisible to all other eyes.
He ran towards the low doorway, and scarcely had he vanished from
the outer world below when she heard a door bang at the end of the
corridor and the rush of hurrying feet. How quick, how impetuous, what
a creature of fire and name he seemed as he dashed into the room and
clasped her in his arms!
“Are these your African manners?” she gasped, laughing and crying in
the same moment.
“Oh, my love, my love, how sweet to hold you on my heart again and be
forgiven! I am forgiven, am I not, dear? My calamity, or my crime--call
it what you will--is forgiven. Oh, love, I have suffered. I have drunk
the cup of atonement.”
She was sobbing upon his shoulder, her face hidden, as she clung to
him, with wasted arms wreathing his neck. In the blindness of his
joy--for joy, like fortune, is stone blind--he had not noticed how
pitiably thin those caressing arms had grown. Suddenly, scared by her
silence, he withdrew himself from that caress, and held her from him at
arm’s length, and, looking into her face, saw the sign manual of death,
and knew why she had summoned him.
By a heroic effort he commanded his countenance, and smiled faintly
back her own faint smile.
“There is no question of the past between you and me,” she said, “only
love, a world of love.”
He drew her to his breast again, cradling the thin cheek against his
brown and bearded countenance, holding her to him as if he would hold
her there against the grim assailant Death, breathing his own strong
life into her as their lips met and their breath mingled. Surely
between them there was life and vigour enough to ward off Death.
“My darling, my darling, my darling!”
It was all that he could say just yet. The rapture of reunion, the
agony of an unspeakable dread were storming heart and mind. He felt
like a man lashed to the mast in a hurricane, all the forces of Nature
warring round him, unable to measure his danger or his chance of rescue.
To have her, to hold her again, loving him as of old. And then to
lose her! But must he lose her? Could neither love nor science work a
miracle, and snatch her from the jaws of the Destroyer?
He grew calmer presently, and they sat side by side in the deepening
shadows, and began to talk to each other quietly, in soft hushed
voices, while the music and the voices of the Riva mixed with their
half-whispered sentences, and the footsteps went by with a gay spring
in them as if all Venice were hurrying from pleasure to pleasure.
“Oh, dearest, it was time you sent for me; it was time,” he said. “You
have given me a long penance. Nothing but Africa could have helped me
to bear my life. In a world less full of strange hazards I must have
lost patience with calamity, and made a swift and sudden end of myself.
Thanks to the Dark Continent I have lived somehow, as you see, and come
back a semi-savage, a creature of thews and sinews.”
“No, you are only rougher looking and browner. I can see the soul
shining through your eyes. Africa has not altered that.”
“But you, dear love,” he said, with a thrill in his voice that marked
the strangled sob, “you are altered. You are looking tired and ill. I
am afraid you have been neglecting yourself. I shall take you to the
Engadine, where we ought to have taken poor Peggy. The Riviera was a
mistake. A winter at St. Moritz would have cured her. We will start
to-morrow.”
She did not answer for a minute or so, but nestled nearer to him, with
her wan cheek leaning against his shoulder, and her waxen fingers
clasping his strong wrist, hardened and roughened by weather and toil.
“The Engadine can do nothing for me, Jack--no more than it could have
done for Peggy. South or north, mountain or valley, the end would have
been the same. It is our family history, Jack. We were doomed from our
birth. I was sent to the Engadine last winter, and Hetty and I only
left St. Moritz in March. We stayed at Varese for nearly a month, and
then came here. Hetty is with me, so bright, so active, so happy; but
some day perhaps she will look in the glass as I have looked, and will
see the summons written on her face. Dear husband, don’t be too sorry
for me. This parting must have come, even if we had escaped the other;
even if I had never known what happened at Florian’s; never knelt
beside my brother’s grave in the island cemetery. Let me lie near him,
Jack: and whatever your future life may be--and God grant it may be
rich in blessings, you have suffered enough for your sin--think of me
sometimes; and sometimes, in your wanderings, go to San Michele and
look upon my grave.”
He clasped her close against his heart, with a shuddering sigh.
* * * * *
Two days after, he took her away from the life and movement of the Riva
to a palace on the Grand Canal, where the quiet of the Silent City had
a soothing influence on her overwrought spirit. If any life could have
been happy in which the end was so near, theirs would have been happy
in that delicious beginning of the Venetian summer, a season when mere
existence is a privilege. Whatever love which passeth understanding
can do to smooth the last days of a fading life was done for Eve; and
it may be that the footsteps of the invincible Enemy were slackened
somewhat by that unsleeping watchfulness.
The end came slowly, and not ungently, and till the end her husband was
her devoted nurse and companion, thinking no thought that was not of
her.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
Transcriber’s Notes
Several minor punctuation errors were fixed. Inconsistencies in
hyphenation have been retained as published.
Page 10: changed Burnano to Burano.
Page 65: changed Cabel to Caleb.
Page 71: changed Marchand to Marchant.
Page 95: changed vilage to village.
Page 124: changed wofully to woefully.
Page 144: changed Merewold to Merewood.
Page 145: changed Hollman to Hollmann.
Page 148: changed Titan to Titian.
Page 191: changed coronetted to coroneted.
Page 206: changed unconsciouness to unconsciousness.
Page 207: changed carlessly to carelessly.
Page 208 and 233: changed Bellaggio to Bellagio.
Page 212: changed were to where.
Page 215: changed Cannabière to Cannebière.
Page 223: changed musn’t to mustn’t.
Page 236: changed Capello to Cappello.
Page 243: changed belissima to bellissima.
Page 304: changed Excellenza to Eccellenza.
Page 315: changed Signora to Signor.