CHAPTER XXVIII.
IN THE BLUE CHAMBER.
Eve had learnt Madame Vivanti’s address from Lady Hartley the day after the singer’s appearance in Hill Street. So her letter to her husband written, and her mind made up, she had only to drive to Don Saltero’s Mansion, and to make her way to that upper floor in which the singer had her bower. The door was opened by Fiordelisa herself, who gave a little look of surprise at seeing hervisitor, and then stood in mute wonder, waiting for Eve to speak, smiling faintly, and evidently embarrassed.
She wore her accustomed black stuff gown, with a yellow silk handkerchief knotted carelessly on her breast. The boy was hanging on to her gown, and peeping shyly at the strange lady, so pure and fresh looking in her soft grey silk, and dainty grey hat with pale pink roses. Lisa noted her rival’s toilette in all its details, the long loose grey gloves, the grey parasol.
For a minute or so the two women stood thus, looking at each other in silence. Then, with an effort, Eve spoke.
“Are you alone, Madame Vivanti?”
“Alone, all but Paolo, and I don’t suppose you count him anybody,Eccellenza. La Zia has gone to London.”
“I have come to talk to you—about my husband.”
Lisa flushed crimson.
“Please take the trouble to sit down, Eccellenza,” she said politely, placing her prettiest armchair in front of the open window.
There were flowers in the balcony, a bed of marigolds, a flower which la Zia had discovered to be decorative and cheap. For perfume there were stocks and mignonette. The balcony was wide enough to hold plenty of flowers, and a couple of basket chairs in which Lisa and her aunt sat for many idle hours in fine weather, breathing the cool breezes from the river, and submitting to the blacks. They thought of their attic window in the Campo, and the life and movement in the paved square below, the passing and repassing of the light-hearted crowd to and fro on the Rialto, the twanging of a guitar now and then, the tinkling of wiry mandolines, the nasal tones of a street-singer. Here they had a wider horizon, but a murkier sky, and not that concentration of gaiety which makes every campo in Venice a busy little world, self-contained and self-sufficing. Eve looked round the room, noting the pretty furniture, obviously chosen by a person of taste; the open piano; the glimpse of a somewhat untidy bedroom through a door ajar. Her husband had chosen the furniture, Eve told herself. He had built this nest for his singing-bird.
“I am looking at your rooms,” she said, with pale lips; “the rooms my husband furnished for you.”
Lisa had not even the grace to attempt a denial.
“He was very good, very generous,” she faltered, her eyes suffused with tears, those tears which came so readily to Lisa’s eyes, on the stage or off. “There never was any one so good as he.”
“He owed you at least as much as that,” said Eve, sternly. “It was the least he could do.”
“Ah, he has told you then,” cried Lisa, eagerly; “he has told you his secret.”
“No, he has not told me. He was too much ashamed to tell me of anything so infamous. He is not shameless like you,” said Eve, trembling with indignant feeling.
It was all true then, all that Sefton had told her sister; all that her own jealous fears had suggested. This woman stood before her, unabashed, ready to expatiate upon her sin.
“He has told me nothing,” she said, “or if he has spoken of you it has only been to deceive me. But there are some things that are easy to guess, when a woman has lived in the world as I have, and has heard other women talk. Two years ago perhaps I might have been fooled by his falsehoods; but I am wiser now. I knew from the first that you had been his mistress; that he was the father of that boy.”
She pointed to the unconscious Paolo, sprawling on the floor, turning the leaves of a picture-book, and doing his utmost to destroy an indestructible “Jack the Giant Killer,” printed on stout linen.
“You knew what was not true, then,” said Lisa, drawing herself up, with crimson cheeks and flaming eyes. “You pretend to know that which is false, false,una bugia indegna. He was never anything to me but a friend, my generous and noble friend. He hired this apartment for us, for la Zia and me, and he furnished these rooms, and he bought me that piano, and he paid the good Zinco to teach me to sing.E vero!I owe him my fortune, and all I have in the world. I would walk barefoot all over this earth if I could make him happier by my toil. There is nothing in this world I would not do for him.”
“And you ask me to believe that he did all this for friendship—mere friendship—he, an English gentleman, for an Italian peasant?”
“I don’t ask you to believe anything, and I don’t care what you believe. He is all the world to me. You are nothing—less than nothing!” cried Lisa, passionately. “I hate you. If it had not been for you he would have married me, perhaps. Who knows?”
“You think he would have married you! And yet he was only your friend, you say.”
“He was only my friend.”
“He brought you and your aunt from Italy and set you up in London; and yet he was only your friend.”
“He did not bring us from Italy. We came to London of our own accord. He was only my friend. He was never any more than my friend. If he had been I would not disown him. I love him too well to be ashamed.”
“You own that you love him?”
“Yes, I am not ashamed of my love. There are people somewhere who worship the sun. I am no more ashamed than they are. I told him of my love on my knees in this room, where you aresitting. I knelt at his feet and asked him to give me heart for heart. I thought then that he would hardly have been so kind unless he loved me. But he told me that he loved an English girl, and that she was to be his wife. There was no hope for me. I wanted to kill myself, but he stopped me with his strong arms. Yes, for just one moment I was in his arms! Only one moment, and then he flung me from him as if I were dirt.”
“He must have been very chivalrous to do so much for friendship,” said Eve, shaken, but not convinced.
The woman spoke with the accents of truth; but Eve remembered that she was an actress, trained in the art of simulated passion. No doubt it was easy for an actress to lie like truth.
“He wanted to help us,” protested Lisa; “he blamed himself so much for——”
She stopped, coloured, and then grew pale. It was evident to her now that Vansittart’s wife had been told nothing, and she, Lisa, had been on the point of betraying him.
“For what? Why did he blame himself?”
“Did I say ‘blame’? I use wrong words sometimes,” she said, quick to recover herself. “I hardly know your language. He pitied us: that is what I meant to say. He pitied us because we were alone and poor—two helpless women.”
“And the father of your child, where was he?” Eve asked sternly, only half convinced. “Why did not he help you?”
Paolo had grown tired of his book, and had gone back to his mother’s knee. He stood half hidden in Lisa’s gown, looking earnestly at the stranger, his infantile mind puzzled at the tone and manner of the two women, feeling dimly that there was a tempest in the atmosphere, feeling it as the birds feel when they twitter apprehensively before the coming of the thunder. Inquisitive as well as alarmed, and bold in his wonder, he went over to Eve, and took hold of her gown, and looked up in her face.
She looked down at him, and it was her turn to wonder.
Of whom did the face remind her? He was like his mother; but it was not her face he recalled to Eve. Nor was it Vansittart’s face, though she tried, shrinkingly, to trace a resemblance there, looking for something she hoped not to see. No, the face recalled some other face, and the likeness, faint and indefinable as it was, thrilled her with a tremulous awe, as if she had seen a ghost.
“You had a claim upon this child’s father,” said Eve, her hand lightly touching the boy’s head, and then shrinking away as from pollution; “the strongest possible claim, for he ought to have been your husband. Why did not he help you?”
“Because he was in his grave,” said Lisa; and again the ready tears gushed out.
There was a pause, and then Eve spoke in a gentler tone.
“That was hard for you,” she said, with a touch of pity.
“Yes, it was hard. He had promised to marry me. I think he would have married me, for Paolo’s sake. My baby was not born till afterwards—after his father’s death.”
“Poor creature! All that was very sad. Was my husband—was Mr. Vansittart a friend of the man who died? Was it for his friend’s sake he was so kind to you?”
“No, he was not a friend. It was for my sake, and la Zia’s, that he was kind. I tell you again, he pitied us.”
Eve sank into a chair, drooping, miserable. Even yet she could not believe in this story of Vansittart’s chivalrous kindness to two foreign waifs who had no claim upon his friendship, not even the claim of country. She knew him to be benevolent, generous, full of compassion for all suffering of man or beast; but there was nothing Quixotic in his benevolence. That which he had done for Lisa was too much to be expected of any man who was not a millionaire or a musical fanatic. He could not have done so much without a strong motive. And then once again she reminded herself that Lisa was an actress, to whom all falsehoods and simulations must be easy. She started to her feet; indignant with this woman for deceiving her; angry with herself for being so easily duped.
“I don’t believe a word you have told me,” she cried. “I believe that Mr. Vansittart was your lover; my husband, John Vansittart, and no other; and when he came here the other day you had lured him back to your net.”
“You don’t believe—you don’t believe in Paolo’s dead father? Don’t cry, Carissimo; she is a cruel woman, but she shan’t hurt you.” The boy had begun to whimper, scared by the angry voices. “I will make you believe. I will show you his likeness—the likeness I have never shown to any one else. It is a bad one; it does not make him half handsome enough. He was handsome; he had hair as light as yours, only redder, and he was very fair—a true Englishman. He was not as handsome as your husband—no, there is no one else likehim. Shall I show you his picture? Will you believe me then?”
She did not wait for an answer, but ran into the adjoining room, pulled a heavy, iron-clamped box from under the bed—the box which contained her jewels—unlocked it, and came running back with a photograph in her hand.
“Ecco, Signora. It was taken at Burano, by a man who came from Venice one summer morning, and photographed the church, and the street, and the bridge, and as many of the people as would pay him a few soldi for a likeness. I have kept it hidden away since he died. It hurt me to look at it, remembering his end. Butthere!”—pushing the photograph in front of Eve’s gloomy, distrustful countenance—“look at it to your heart’s content, Signora. That man was the father of my child! Believe, or not believe, as you please.”
Eve glanced with a careless contempt at the faded sun-picture—a bad photograph, which time had made worse—the blurred image of a face which, as her widening gaze fastened upon it, flashed back all the picture of her childhood upon the mirror of her memory.
“Oh, God!” she cried. “My brother Harold!”
The door opened as she spoke, and looking up she saw her husband standing on the threshold.
She appealed to him hopelessly in her bewilderment.
“Did you know?” she asked. “Was it for my sake you were kind to her? Was that the link between you?”
“No, Fatima,” he answered sternly. “My Blue Chamber holds a ghastlier secret than that. I was kind to her because I killed her lover. Are you satisfied now? You wanted to know the worst. You would not be content. We were united, happy, adoring each other; the happiest husband and wife in all London, perhaps; but you would not be satisfied. I entreated you to trust me. I assured you, with every asseveration a man could make, that I was true to you. But you would not believe. You were like your first namesake; you lent your ear to the hiss of the snake. You were jealous by a woman’s instinct, and you let Sefton feed your jealousy. Well, you are content now, perhaps. You have his picture in your hand—the picture of the man I killed.”
“You killed him? You?”
“It sounds like madness, doesn’t it, but it’s true all the same. A vulgar incident enough—nothing romantic about the story. The man whose likeness you hold, and whom you recognize as your brother—that man and I met as strangers in a Venetian caffè, in Carnival time. This young woman here and her aunt were with me—the chance acquaintance of the afternoon. We had known each other only a few hours, had we, Fiordelisa? You did not even know my name.”
“Only a few hours,” nodded Lisa.
“He had been on a journey, and had been drinking. He came on us unawares; and he chose to take offence because Lisa and her aunt and I were sitting at the same table. He was easily jealous—as you are. It runs in the family, perhaps. He assaulted me brutally, and I fought him almost as brutally. It would have all ended harmlessly enough with a rough mauling of each other—perhaps a black eye, or a broken nose—but as Fate would have it I had a dagger ready to my hand—and exasperated at a little extra brutality on his part I stabbed him. Luck was against us both.That casual thrust of a dagger might have resulted in a slight flesh wound. It killed him.”
“And you let me love you—you let me be your wife—knowing that you had murdered my brother,” said Eve, trembling in every limb, white as death.
“No, Eve. It was not murder. It is the intention that makes the crime. He was unarmed, drunk. I ought to have spared him, I suppose—but he fell upon me like a tiger. It was brute force against brute force. The knife was an unlucky accident.”
“He had just bought it in the Procuratie,” explained Lisa; “he had no thought of killing him. You do not know how violent the Englishman could be. He was cruel to me sometimes—he struck me many times when he was angry.”
“You take the part of the murderer against the murdered—though this man would have married you, would have made you an honest woman.”
“He had promised,” said Lisa, doubtfully.
Eve put the photograph to her white lips and kissed it passionately, again, and again, and again.
“Oh, Harold,” she said, “to have hoped so long for your return, to have prayed so many useless prayers! You were dead—dead before that child was born.”
She looked at the boy, reckoning the years by the child’s growth. Four years, at least, she told herself.
“And you dared to make me your wife, to let me love you with a love that was almost idolatry,” she cried, turning upon Vansittart with dilated eyes, “knowing that you had killed my brother. You heard me talk of him—you pretended to sympathize with me—and you knew that you had killed him.”
“I did not know. There was no such thing as certainty. When I asked you to be my wife I knew nothing of your brother’s fate. Afterwards, when we were engaged, the idea was suggested to me by your officious friend Sefton—who wanted to put a stumbling-block in the way of our marriage. He succeeded in tracing your brother to Venice, and he read the story after his own lights. He thought Harold Marchant was the man who struck the fatal blow. He did not take him for the victim. But the links in his chain of evidence were not over strong—and I had ample justification for not accepting his assertions as certainties. And you loved me, did you not; and our marriage was likely to make your life fairer and brighter, was it not?”
“What of that? Do you think I should have weighed my own love or my own happiness against my brother’s life? Do you think I would have married you if I had known the truth?”
“You would not, perhaps; and two lives would have been spoiltby your loyalty to the dead—who would sleep none the more peacefully because you and I were miserable. Did you owe him so much, this wandering brother of yours? What kindness had he ever shown you? What care had he ever taken of you?”
“He was my brother, and I loved him dearly.”
“And did not I love you, and had not I some claim upon you?” asked Vansittart, indignantly. “Could you have let me go without a tear?”
“No, no, no. I adored you from the first—yes, that first night on the snowy road, and at the ball, when you were so kind. I began to love you almost at once, foolishly, ridiculously, without a hope of being loved again. But, let my love be what it would, the love of a lifetime, it would have made no difference. Nothing would have induced me to marry the man who killed my brother. Oh, God,” she cried hysterically, “the hands that I have kissed so often—stained with Harold’s life-blood!”
“I thought as much,” said Vansittart, doggedly. “I told myself that you would not marry me if you knew my secret. I told myself that two lives would be spoilt—it was a question, perhaps, of half a century of happiness for two people, to be sacrificed because of the angry passions of one night—of one minute. The deed was done in less time than the bronze giants of the clock-tower would have taken to strike the hour. Because once in my life, for one instant, under grossest provocation, I let my temper master me—because of that one savage impulse two hearts were to be broken. I spent a night of agony deliberating this question, Eve. Mark you, it was within a few weeks of our wedding-day that your kindred with the dead man was first suggested to me.”
“You knew that you had killed a fellow-creature?”
“Yes, I knew, and I had suffered all the bitterness of a long remorse; and I had given myself absolution. And when I knew the worst, knew at least the probability that I had killed your brother, even then, after most earnest questioning, I told myself that it was best for both of us that we should marry. Our lives were our own. Neither of us was responsible to that dead man in his grave. But now, now that I see how dear he was to you, now that I know which way your heart turns, I wish to God that he had killed me, and that I were lying where he lies, among that quiet company by the lagune.”
They were alone together, Lisa having slipped away, taking the boy with her, when she found the revelation inevitable. Let them fight it out, these two; and if this Englishwoman loved her dead brother better than her living husband, and chose to desert that noble husband, and thus show of what poor stuff she was made, there was Lisa who adored him, who would follow him through theworld, if he would let her, with fidelity that neither time nor trouble could change.
Eve stood for a few moments mutely looking at the blurred photograph, the wretched production of an itinerant photographer’s camera, in which one hand was out of focus, jointless, fingerless, monstrous. Poor as the image was, it brought back the days of her childhood as vividly as if it had been the finest work of art that Venice, in her golden age of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese, could have produced. How well she remembered him! How dearly she had loved him! His holidays had been a season of boisterous gladness, his return to school or university a time of mourning. He had given interest and delight to all her childish amusements. He had taught her to ride. He had taught her to shoot with an air-gun, which was one of his choicest possessions. He had taught her to serve at tennis, to play billiards on the worn-out table, where the balls rattled against the cushions as on cast iron. He had done all these things in a casual way, never sacrificing any inclination or engagement of his own to her pleasure—but in after days, when he had vanished out of her life, she knew not whither, it seemed to her that he had been the kindest and most unselfish of brothers. And he was dead, had been dead for years, cut off in the prime of his manhood by a remorseless hand. He was dead, and the man who had slain him stood before her, undaunted, impenitent—her husband.
And the boy whose treble voice sounded now and again from the next room—the child from whose lightest contact she had shrank with jealous abhorrence—that child was of her kindred, no matter how basely born. He was all that was left to her of the brother she had loved, and it was not for her to shrink from him.