“Let you? Why, your pin-money is your own, to throw in the gutter if you like.”
“No, no; it was meant for your wife. I shall have no claim upon it when we are parted. But I don’t want to be a burden at the Homestead. I should like to give them fifty pounds a year. I shall not cost them so much as that.”
“I dare say not. Why do you torture me with this talk of money? All the money I have is turned to withered leaves. Eve, Eve,” he cried passionately, “you could not do this cruel thing if our child had lived!”
“Could I not? Would that have altered the fact that you killed my brother? No, for God’s sake don’t come near me,” as he approached her with extended hand, trying to clasp her hand in his, passionately longing for reunion. “There is a ghost between us. I should hate myself if I could forget the dead.”
“Ah, that is the worst sting of death,” he cried bitterly, “the influence of the dead which blights the living. Is there no hope, Eve—no hope? Is your mind made up?”
“Alas! alas! I have no choice.”
“Take time to think, at least, before you act.”
“Time to think? Why, I have been thinking for an eternity. It is ages since that woman put this picture in my hand. Oh, I have thought, Jack. I have thought. If I could shut my eyes and say I forget—if I could say the past is past, and the dead are no better for our tears and our sacrifices, our crape gowns, or the roses we plant on their graves—if I could be like the heathens who said, ‘Let us be happy today, for tomorrow we die,’ how gladly would I blot thought and memory from my brain! But you see while I live I must think and remember; and every hour of my life with you would be darkened by one hideous memory. I should see my brother in his bloodstained winding-sheet standing between us. There are some things that cannot be, that heart, and mind, and conscience cry out against, and our marriage is one of those things. Oh, it was wicked, wicked, to marry me, knowing what you knew.”
“Was it wicked? If it was, I don’t repent of that sin. I repent my first crime—the crime of bloodshed—not my second, the crime of making you my wife. I have had two years of bliss. How many men can say as much? Well, since you are resolute—have weighed what you are doing, and still decide against me, I will leave you in peace. If the memory of those years cannot plead for me, all words are idle.”
She heard the strangled sob in his voice as he turned from her and went slowly to the door: but she did not call him back. She stood like a woman of stone till the door closed on him, and the outer door opened and shut again. Then she clasped her hands above her head with a distracted gesture, and rushed out upon the balcony to see the last of him. She leant over the high iron rail to watch him as he sprang into the waiting hansom. She saw him drive away, and did not shriek to him to come back, though her whole being, brain, heart, nerves, yearned after him with despairing love. She watched till the cab vanished from her sight, hidden by the foliage on the Embankment, and then she dragged herself slowly back to the room, as a wounded animal crawls to its lair, and flung herself upon Lisa’s sofa, a brokenhearted woman.
“Could I act otherwise—could I, could I?” she asked herself. “My brother, my own flesh and blood! Even if I had not loved him, could I live with the man who killed him?”
Lisa crept into the room, while Eve sat sobbing, with her face hidden in the sofa pillow. Lisa crept to her side, and sat on the ground by her, pitying her, and looking up at her with mute doglike tenderness. “What have you done?” she asked at last. “Have you sent him from you—your husband who loves you?”
“Yes, he is gone. It is our fate.”
“Fate!” cried Lisa, contemptuously. “What is fate? It is you, not Fate, that make the parting. If you loved him you would not let him go.”
“If I loved him? Why, my whole being is made up of love for him.”
“What then? And you send him from you for an accident—for something which no one could help. I was there—these eyes saw it. A moment and it was done! There was not time for thought. For that one instant of wrongdoing are you to make his life miserable?”
“He killed my brother. Do you understand that, Lisa? The man who ought to have been your husband was my brother. Did you care nothing for him—you, the mother of his child?”
“Si, si, I cared for him. When first he came to Burano I worshipped him as if he had been St. Mark. And when he said, ‘Come to Venice with me, Lisa, and be my little wife,’ I went. It was wicked, I know. I ought not to have left Burano till I had been to confession, and the priest had married us; but when I said, ‘You will marry me, Signor Inglese,’ he said, ‘Yes, Lisa, by-and-by,’ and that was what he always said till the last—‘by-and-by.’ He was not always kind to me, Si’ora, though he was your brother. He beat me sometimes when the luck had been bad at cards. When he had been sitting up half the night playing cards with his friends, and I crept into the room and begged him to play no more—he was not kind then. He would start up out of his chair, and swear a big English oath, and strike at me with his clenched fist. But am I sorry? Yes, of course I am sorry.
