CHAPTER XXXII.
“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 entresolwould 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.