XXXIII
“Both Together, He Her God, She His Idol”
Pale, quiet, resolute, with her mind made up as to what she had to do, Eve Vansittart crossed the Piazzetta towards Florian’s Caffè, and slowly, very slowly, passed in front of the windows, looking at the loungers seated here and there at the marble tables, and wondering whether this was the scene of her brother’s fate. She had not been told the name of the caffè. She only knew that it was at Venice, in Carnival time, and at a crowded caffè that the fatal encounter had happened.
She passed Florian’s, and a door or two further on was assailed by a photographer, who wanted to sell her views of the city at five francs a dozen, and who would not believe that she could exist without them. She looked at him absently for a minute or two while he showed his views, expatiating upon their beauty and cheapness, and after that thoughtful pause went into his shop, seated herself, and turned over the leaves of an album of specimen photographs, choosing a dozen at random—“this—and this—and this”—without looking at them.
“Have you had this shop long?” she asked.
“Fifteen years.”
“Then you must remember something that happened in a caffè in the Piazza—Florian’s, most likely—seven years ago. It was on a Shrove Tuesday, late at night. A young man was killed, accidentally, in a scuffle. Do you remember?”
The photographer shrugged his shoulders.
“That is a thing that might happen any year at Carnival time,” he said lightly. “There is much excitement. Our people are good-natured, very good-natured, but they are hot-tempered, and a blow is quickly given, even a blow that may prove fatal. I cannot say that I remember any particular case.”
“The man who was killed was an Englishman, and the man who killed him was an Englishman.”
“Strange,” said the photographer. “The English are generally cool and collected—a serious nation. Had it been an American I should be less surprised. The Americans are more like us. There is more quicksilver in their blood.”
“Cannot you remember now? An Englishman, a gentleman, stabbed by an English gentleman,” urged Eve. “Surely such things do not happen every day?”
“Every day? No, Signora. But in Carnival time one is prepared for strange things happening. I begin to recall the circumstance, but not very clearly. A young Englishman stabbed with a dagger that had been bought over the way a short time before. He had been drinking, and was jealous of a young woman who was present. He attacked his compatriot with savage violence. Yes, I recall the affair more clearly now. There were those present who said he brought his fate upon himself by his brutality. The man who stabbed him made a bolt of it, on a hint from a bystander—ran across the Piazzetta, jumped into the water, and swam for his life. No one in Venice ever knew what became of him. He must have been picked up by a gondola, and must have got away by the railroad. Who knows? He may have got ashore on the mainland, and made his way to Mestre, so as to avoid the railway station here, where the police might be on the watch for him. Anyhow, he got away. He had courage, quickness, his wits well about him.”
“It was at Florian’s that this happened?” asked Eve.
“Yes, at Florian’s—where else? There is no caffè in Venice equal to Florian’s.”
That was all. She paid for her photographs and went back to Florian’s, and peered in at the bright, pretty salons, where the Italians were lounging over their coffee, with here and there a group playing dominoes, and where tourists—English, American, German—were enjoying themselves more noisily. She wondered in which of those salons the tragedy had been acted. Was the stain of her brother’s blood on the floor ineffaceable, like Rizzio’s in the fatal room at Holyrood? She loitered for a few minutes, looking in through the open doors and windows shudderingly; and seeing she was observed, she moved quickly away, and presently was being followed across the piazza by a Venetian seeker of bonnes fortunes, she herself happily unconscious of the fact.
She looked at the shops in the Procuratie Vecchie, and was pestered by the touting shopkeepers after their Venetian manner. She looked in at all those Eastern toys and Italian gewgaws, and jewellery which has here and there a suggestion of Birmingham.
“Do you sell daggers?” she asked a black-eyed youth, who had entreated her earnestly to ascend to the showroom above, assuring her that the “to look costs nothing.”
Her question startled him. “Daggers, yes, assuredly. Was it a jewelled dagger for her hair that the Signora desired? He had of the most magnificent.”
No. She wanted no dagger, only to know whether he sold them, real daggers, strong enough to wound fatally.
He showed her a whole armoury of Moorish knives, any one of which looked as if it might be deadly.
“Do you remember a young Englishman being killed with such a dagger as this?” she said, pointing to one of the deadliest, “by accident, in Carnival time?”
He remembered, or affected to remember, nothing.
Leaving his shop, after buying half a dozen bead necklaces for civility, Eve found herself face to face with her Venetian admirer, upon whom she turned so dark a frown as to repel even that practised Lothario. She hurried back to Danieli’s, and arrived there flushed and breathless, and far too much exhausted to do justice to the simple little dinner of clear soup and roast chicken which Benson had ordered, a dinner served in her own sitting-room, which privilege of dining alone was Eve’s only extravagance in her
