CHAPTER XXXIII.
“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 ofbonnes 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 SMIZZMORTO 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 beenspent 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 theField, 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 toHamletor “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 herFieldEve 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 theCity 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, SteamerCity 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 shehad 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 eyeslighted 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 theSilent 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 NotesSeveral minor punctuation errors were fixed. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained as published.Page10: changedBurnanotoBurano.Page65: changedCabeltoCaleb.Page71: changedMarchandtoMarchant.Page95: changedvilagetovillage.Page124: changedwofullytowoefully.Page144: changedMerewoldtoMerewood.Page145: changedHollmantoHollmann.Page148: changedTitantoTitian.Page191: changedcoronettedtocoroneted.Page206: changedunconsciounesstounconsciousness.Page207: changedcarlesslytocarelessly.Page208and233: changedBellaggiotoBellagio.Page212: changedweretowhere.Page215: changedCannabièretoCannebière.Page223: changedmusn’ttomustn’t.Page236: changedCapellotoCappello.Page243: changedbelissimatobellissima.Page304: changedExcellenzatoEccellenza.Page315: changedSignoratoSignor.
Transcriber’s Notes
Several minor punctuation errors were fixed. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained as published.
Page10: changedBurnanotoBurano.
Page65: changedCabeltoCaleb.
Page71: changedMarchandtoMarchant.
Page95: changedvilagetovillage.
Page124: changedwofullytowoefully.
Page144: changedMerewoldtoMerewood.
Page145: changedHollmantoHollmann.
Page148: changedTitantoTitian.
Page191: changedcoronettedtocoroneted.
Page206: changedunconsciounesstounconsciousness.
Page207: changedcarlesslytocarelessly.
Page208and233: changedBellaggiotoBellagio.
Page212: changedweretowhere.
Page215: changedCannabièretoCannebière.
Page223: changedmusn’ttomustn’t.
Page236: changedCapellotoCappello.
Page243: changedbelissimatobellissima.
Page304: changedExcellenzatoEccellenza.
Page315: changedSignoratoSignor.