“You are a semi-civilized savage, and you can’t understand,” said Eve, sternly. “Life and death, good name, and honour, have no meaning for you.”
“Love means more than all,” said Lisa, doggedly.
“There is only one man you have the right to love,” said Eve; “the man who ought to have been your husband. You must be indeed a wretch if you can love the man who killed him.”
“Ah, madonna mia, we do not make our hearts. They are made for us,” Lisa pleaded naively. “The Signor Inglese was very good to me at Burano in my poverty; but afterwards, at Venice, I had a good deal to suffer. It was a hard life sometimes. One had need be young, and able to laugh, and forgive and forget. But he—Signor Vansittart—he was always kind. His face haunted me after that Shrove Tuesday on the Lido, and when we met again—when la Zia and I were strangers in London, without a friend in the world—oh, how kind and generous he was! All that I have of fame and fortune I owe to him, and though he does not care for me so much as that,” with a contemptuous wave of her fingers, “yet he is always gentle, always good. Do not tell me that I am to care more for the dead man who deceived me and beat me than for the living man who has been my benefactor, my guardian angel, and for whom I say a paternoster and two aves every night of my life. It is sweet to say these for his sake: that his sin may be forgiven.”
“Ah, you do not understand. You do not know what death is,” said Eve, with gloomy anger, getting up from the sofa, and rearranging her loosened hair with trembling hands.
“It must come to all of us,” answered Lisa, with a philosophical shrug. “Better that it should come in a moment as his came, without suffering, without fear, than that we should live to be old and fat and full of maladies. People die of dreadful diseases that one shudders only to hear of, and that is called a natural death. How much better to be stabbed to the heart unawares.”
“I cannot reason with you,” said Eve, haughtily. “I loved my brother. You, his mistress, evidently cared nothing for him.”
And with this verbal stab, she departed. Who shall say whether she was more indignant with the Venetian for loving Harold Marchant too little or for loving John Vansittart too much?
Her carriage was waiting for her; the servants were asleep in the afternoon sun. She was only just able to utter the monosyllabic “Home,” in answer to the footman’s question.
How strange the streets and all their movement of everyday life seemed to her, as she drove along the interminable King’s Road, and by Sloane Street and the Park—how careless the faces of the people. Was there no other trouble in the world but her own? Was everybody else busy, and bustling, and happy? She felt as if she had been driving home from a funeral, wondering to find a world where there were no signs of sorrow. Had she not verily parted from her dead? The dead brother whom she had always pictured to herself as alive and happy in some far-off African wilderness, leading the adventurer’s reckless life, caring for no one he had left in the civilized world, but destined to come back to her hereafter with that wild spirit tamed, and his home affections reviving with mature years. He was dead, and she would see him no more on earth—killed in a tavern brawl, for the sake of a worthless woman. And the husband she adored, he, too, was dead—dead to her forever. She had renounced him, and he was free to go his own way, and lead his own life, and find consolation and happiness where he could. Her friends of Mayfair had told her that no man laments long for the loss of any woman; that one beautiful face blots out another; that there is no image, however cherished, which does not grow faint, and fade and vanish, as a circle widens and melts away upon still water.
Even the house in Charles Street had a strange aspect when she reentered it. Should she find him there? Would he plead with her again, in their own house, where she had been so happy with him, where all mute things reminded her of the glad life he had given her? Would he plead with her once more, and renew the struggle between love for the living and loyalty to the dead? No; she was spared that ordeal. The servant who opened the door told her that his master had been summoned hurriedly to Southampton, and had left a letter for her. She caught up the letter eagerly, hungry, in her desolation, for some sign from him, some last link between them.
“I start by the mail for Southampton,” he wrote. “Till nine I shall be within reach of a telegram at the Travellers, if you change your mind. Before tomorrow night I shall be outward bound; but till tomorrow night a wire
