“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 spoilt by 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 lifeblood!”
“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
