AFTER FIVE YEARS.
Moonlight falling like a silvery veil over Venice--a crystal clear
crescent in a purple sky shimmering on palace and prison, churches,
squares and canals, on the gliding gondolas and the flitting forms
passing like noiseless shadows to and fro.
A young lady leaned from a window of a vast Venetian hotel, gazing
thoughtfully at the silver-lighted landscape, so strange, so unreal, so
dream-like to her unaccustomed eyes. A young lady, stately and tall,
with a pale, proud face, and a statuesque sort of beauty that was
perfect in its way. She was dressed in trailing robes of crape and
bombazine, and the face, turned to the moonlight, was cold and still as
marble.
She turned her eyes from the moonlit canal, down which dark gondolas
floated to the music of the gay gondolier's song; once, as an English
voice in the piazza below sung a stave of a jingling barcarole--
"Oh! gay we row where full tides flow!
And bear our bounding pinnace;
And leap along where song meets song,
Across the waves of Venice."
The singer, a tall young man, with a florid face and yellow
side-whiskers, an unmistakable son of the "right little, tight little"
island, paused in his song, as another man, stepping through an open
window, struck him an airy, sledge-hammer slap on the back.
"I ought to know that voice," said the last comer.
"Mortimer, my lad, how goes it?"
"Stafford!" cried the singer, seizing the outstretched hand in a genuine
English grip, "happy to meet you, old boy, in the land of romance! La
Fabre told me you were coming, but who would look for you so soon! I
thought you were doing Sorrento?"
"Got tired of Sorrento," said Stafford, taking his arm for a walk
up and down the piazza; "there's a fever there, too--quite an
epidemic--malignant typhus. Discretion is the better part of valor where
Sorrento fevers are concerned. I left."
"When did you reach Venice?" asked Mortimer, lighting a cigar.
"An hour ago; and now who's here? Any one I know!"
"Lots. The Cholmonadeys, the Lythons, the Howards, of Leighwood; and,
by-the-bye, they have with them the Marble Bride."
"The which?" asked Mr. Stafford.
"The Marble Bride, the Princess Frostina; otherwise Miss Aileen Jocyln,
of Jocyln Hall Devonshire. You knew the old colonel, I think; he died
over a year ago, you remember."
"Ah, yes! I remember. Is she here with the Howards, and as handsome as
ever, no doubt?"
"Handsome, to my mind, with an uplifted and unapproachable sort of
beauty. A fellow might as soon love some bright particular star, etc.,
as the fabulously wealthy heiress of all the Jocylns. She has no end of
suitors--all the best men here bow at the shrine of the ice-cold Aileen,
and all in vain."
"You among the rest, my friend?" with a light laugh.
"No, by Jove!" cried Mr. Mortimer; "that sort of thing--the marble
style, you know--never was to my taste. I admire Miss Jocyln
immensely--just as I do the moon up there, with no particular desire
ever to be nearer."
"What was that story I heard once, five years ago, about a
broken engagement? Wasn't Thetford of that ilk the hero of the
tale?--the romantic Thetford, who resigned his title and estate to a
mysteriously-found elder brother, you know. The story ran through the
papers and the clubs at the time like wildfire, and set the whole
country talking, I remember. She was engaged to him, wasn't she, and
broke off?"
"So goes the story--but who knows? I recollect that odd affair perfectly
well; it was like the melodramas on the sunny side of the Thames. I know
the 'mysteriously-found elder brother,' too--very fine fellow, Sir Guy
Thetford, and married to the prettiest little wife the sun shines on. I
must say Rupert Thetford behaved wonderfully well in that unpleasant
business; very few men would do as he did--they would, at least, have
made a fight for the title and estates. By-the-way, I wonder whatever
became of him?"
"I left him at Sorrento," said Stafford, coolly.
"The deuce you did! What was he doing there?"
"Raving in the fever; so the people told me with whom he stopped. I just
discovered he was in the place as I was about to leave it. He had fallen
very low, I fancy; his pictures didn't sell, I suppose; he has been in
the painting line since he ceased to be Sir Rupert, and the world has
gone against him. Rather hard on him to lose fortune, title, home,
bride, and all at one fell swoop. Some women there are who would go with
their plighted husbands to beggary; but I suppose the lovely Aileen is
not one of them."
"And so you left him ill of the fever? Poor fellow!"
"Dangerously ill."
"And the people with whom he is will take very little care of him; he's
as good as dead. Let us go in--I want to have a look at the latest
English papers."
The two men passed in, out of the moonlight, off the piazza, all
unconscious that they had had a listener. The pale watcher in the
trailing black robes, scarcely heeding them at first, had grown more and
more absorbed in the careless conversation. She caught her breath in
quick, short gasps, the dark eyes dilated, the slender hands pressed
themselves tight over the throbbing heart. As they went in off the
balcony she slid from her seat and held up her clasped hands to the
luminous night sky.
"Hear me, oh, God!" the white lips cried--"I, who have aided in wrecking
a noble heart--hear me, and help me to keep my vow! I offer my whole
life in atonement for the cruel and wicked past. If he dies, I shall go
to my grave his unwedded widow. If he lives----"
Her voice faltered and died out, her face drooped forward on the
window-sill, and the flashing moonlight fell like a benediction on the
bowed young head.