The Venetians

to scenes which would once have aroused his keenest interest. How often he had dreamed his summer daydream of Egypt, lying on a velvet lawn in Hampshire, with a volume of old Herodotus, or some modern traveller, flung upon the grass beside him, in the idlesse of a July afternoon! How often he had promised himself a long winter in that historic land! He had not much of the explorer’s ardour in those boyish days, no bent towards undiscovered watersheds and unpleasant encounters with blackamoors, no ambition to be reckoned amongst the mighty marksmen of the world, or to be called the father of lions; though in some vague visions he had fancied himself wandering in that lone land where the Zambesi leaps headlong into the fathomless gorge, in blinding whiteness of foam and deafening thunder of sound, a beauty and a terror to eye and ear. The things he most wanted to see were the things that his fellow-men had made, the palaces and statues, and fortresses and tombs that mean history. He was not a naturalist or a scientific traveller, had no hope of making the world any richer by his discoveries, or of reading the smallest paper at the Geographical Society. He wanted to see men and cities, and all splendid memorials of past ages, for his own pleasure and amusement; and Egypt was one of the countries to which he had looked for delight, if ever satiety and weariness should overtake him amidst the nearer delights of his beloved Italy.

And, behold, today he had walked those Egyptian streets, and let those Egyptian faces pass by him, with eyes that saw not, and with a mind that felt no interest in the things the eyes looked at. The distress in his thoughts, the perpetual labouring of his troubled mind, would not allow of pleasure in anything. That aching agony of remorse had taken hold of him, and left room for no other feeling. To the end of his life all that was picturesque and individual in this Egyptian seaport would be part and parcel of his self-humiliation, associated forever with the thought that he had slain a fellow-creature, under circumstances for which he could find no excuse.

Again and again, as he paced the deck in the starlight, the face of the man he had killed stood out against the deep azure of the sky and sea, as it had looked at him in that awful moment when one last ejaculation, “God!” broke from the parted lips, and the man fell as if struck by a thunderbolt. There was scarcely any change in his face as he fell⁠—no ghastly pallor, no convulsion of the features. As he lay there looking up at the ceiling, one might hardly have thought him dead. No torrent of blood rushed from those parted lips. The stream ebbed slow and dull from the pierced heart. That savage thrust of the dagger had done its work well. How many daggers and what a gory butchery had been needed to make an end of Caesar; and behold this man was done for with one movement of an angry hand. For John Vansittart murder had been made easy.

The homeward voyage seemed ever so much longer than the outward, and the gloom of his mind deepened as the summer days wore out; summer, for it was summer here on the Mediterranean, whatever season it might seem in London, summer at Genoa, summer all along the Riviera, where the mimosas flung their fairy gold across the villa gardens, and the lateen sails shone dazzling white in the vivid sun, and the berceaus were beginning to clothe themselves with young vine leaves, unfolding out of crumpled woolly greyness into tender, translucent green.

He thought of Fiordelisa, and his thoughts of her were bitterest of all. He could not doubt that he had robbed her of her protector, the man whose purse provided for the little household of which she and her aunt had talked so gaily. It might be that he had left her to starve⁠—or worse. Was it likely she would ever go back to Burano, and her lacework, and her threepence-halfpenny a day, and her slipshod shoes, and her polenta, after having tasted the fleshpots of Venice, the pallid asparagus and fat cauliflowers from the market in the Rialto, the savoury messes at the sign of the Black Hat? Would she go back and be a peasant again, after trapesing the Piazzetta in her flashy black and yellow gown, and sitting in a lantern-lit gondola, and twanging on her mandoline?

His experience of her sex and degree inclined him to think that she would not return to the old laborious life, with its hardships and privations. The first step upon the broad high-road of sin having been taken, there would be but little scruple about the second; and those bold, beautiful eyes, that swan throat and graceful form, would belong to somebody else. The easygoing aunt would hardly stand in the way of a new settlement, when the last of their poor possessions had been carried to the Monte di Pietà, and hunger was at hand. Somebody else would pay the little old singing-master, and listen admiringly while Lisa sang to the wiry tinkling of her mandoline; and the lanterns would swing from the beak of the gondola in the festival evenings, and the rockets would shoot up through the purple night in front of Santa Maria della Salute, and all the palaces on the Grand Canal would shine rosy red, reflecting the Bengal fires, and Lisa would forget her murdered man, while those substantial feet of hers tripped gaily down the brimstone path.

If that tall, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man had lived he might have kept his promise and married her. Who is to be sure that he would not? There are men in the world who will wed the girl they love, be she barmaid or ballet-dancer; and that this man was fond of Fiordelisa