Alas for Fiordelisa, widowed in the very morning of life! He who had wrecked her fortune could do nothing to help her. He dared not stretch out his hand towards her. His interest, for the sake of others as well as for his own sake, lay in severing every link that could connect him with the catastrophe of that fatal night. No, he could do nothing for Fiordelisa. He would not have grudged her the half of his income; and he dared not send her so much as a ten-pound note! She must sink or swim.
The thought of her peril doubled the sum of his remorse.
He landed at Marseilles, and here, too, it was summer—summer at her brightest, with azure skies, and a sea deeper, bluer, more darkly glorious than the lapis lazuli in a jewelled châsse. The streets were full of traffic and abloom with flower-girls, noisily pressing their bunches of roses and pale Parma violets upon him as he walked up the Rue de la Cannebière on his way from the quay to the railway hotel. There had been a time when the sights and sounds of that southern port were like strong wine, exhilarating, delighting him, when he could not have too much of the animation and picturesqueness of the place, the Corniche road, the wide-stretching bay with rocks and lighthouses, the sea marks of every kind, and that glittering point where the waterways divide—to the left for Hindostan, China, Japan; to the right for the New World and the setting sun; two paths upon the trackless blue that seemed each to lead direct to fairyland.
And behold he had come from the land of glamour and mystery, from the tombs of the Pharaohs, from the ashes of Cleopatra, heart-weary, caring for nothing.
He went into one of the big caffès on his right hand, seated himself at a table in an obscure corner, and began to examine the papers, hastily turning them over one after another, worried by the sticks to which they were fastened. Yes, here it was, in the Paris Figaro.
“A fatal brawl occurred last Tuesday night in one of the caffès in the Piazza at Venice. Two Englishmen fought savagely about a Venetian girl who had entered the caffè in the company of one of them. Both men appeared to have been drinking, and after a desperate encounter with fists, in the English fashion, the younger and better-looking of the two snatched up a dagger and stabbed his antagonist to the heart. Death was almost instantaneous. The murderer managed to get away in the confusion caused by the unexpected catastrophe, the crowded state of the Piazzetta and the Riva favouring his escape. It is supposed that he jumped into the water, and either managed to scramble into a gondola and get himself conveyed to the railway station or was drowned—though the latter supposition seems unlikely when it is considered that the canal was crowded with boats. Every effort to discover traces of the missing man has been made by the Venetian police, but as yet without success. The name of the murdered man was John Smith. He had been some time resident in Venice, but did not bear a good character in the city, where he was in debt to several of the smaller tradespeople in the Rialto. Very little seems to have been known about his surroundings, even by the elderly woman who kept house for him, or the girl whose existence cost him his life.”
John Smith. An assumed name, no doubt; just as false as that name of Smith which Vansittart had given to the captain and steward of the Berenice.
It did not seem to him, as he reread this paragraph among the Faits Divers in the Figaro, that the fatal event had created so much stir as he had supposed it would create. It seemed to him that he was getting off cheaply, and that he might go down to the grave without being called upon to answer for that deadly stroke. The man’s isolation saved him. Had his victim been the member of a respectable English family, had there been father and mother, brothers and sisters to bewail his loss, much more stringent efforts might have been made to find his murderer. But a reprobate Englishman, a man who had perhaps severed every link that bound him to kindred and country, a scampish individual, living under an assumed name and unable to pay his way, was not the kind of person whose death in a tavern brawl was likely to make a great stir.
Had he disappeared, had there been the attraction of mystery about his doom, a riddle to solve, a crime unexplained and seemingly unexplainable, French and English newspapers might have given columns or florid writing to the case. But here there was no mystery, no dark enigma of love and murder. In the full glare of the gas, in sight of the crowd, these two men had fought, and one had proved himself unworthy of his British birthright by using a dagger against an unarmed antagonist.
Vansittart found the same paragraph repeated in several papers, and amongst his researches, aided by a waiter who brought him the accumulation of the last ten days, he found an old Daily Telegraph in which his crime formed the basis for a spirited leader, full of vivacity and local colour, written by a journalist who evidently knew Venice by heart. In this article the picturesqueness of the city, the riot of Carnival time, the historical associations of Doge and Republic, were more insisted upon than the brutality of the fight, or the unfair use of the dagger.
He felt a little easier in his mind after his examination of the papers. It seemed to him that by the time he arrived at Charing Cross most people would have forgotten all about
