Hetty questioned her sister closely, and reproached her for unkindness in going out unaccompanied; but Eve gave her no explanation of that excursion.
“You are not strong enough to walk about alone, dear,” the sister said tenderly. “You want a giraffe like me to give you an arm.” This was Hetty’s way of alluding to the tall slim figure which had been so much admired on the tennis courts of St. Moritz and Maloja.
Eve engaged a gondola next morning. It was to be her own gondola, and the gondolier was to give allegiance to no one else, so long as Mrs. Vansittart remained in Venice. She set out alone in her gondola directly after breakfast, in spite of Hetty’s remonstrances.
“I have some business in Venice that I must keep to myself, Hetty. It will be the greatest kindness in you to ask no questions.”
“You are full of mysteries,” said Hetty, “but I won’t tease you. Only take care of yourself, dearest, and don’t be unhappy about anything, for the sake of the sisters who idolize you.”
Eve kissed her, and went away without another word. Hetty marched about all the morning with Benson, who showed her St. Mark’s and the pigeons, and the Doge’s Palace, whisking her rapidly through all the picture-rooms, but not letting her off a single dark cell on either side the Bridge of Sighs.
Eve’s first visit was to the chief office of the Venetian police, where she found an obliging functionary, who, at her desire, produced the record of the unknown Englishman’s death.
The story was bald and brief. A scuffle, ending in a fatal wound from a dagger. The man who used the dagger had escaped. The weapon was in the possession of the police.
“Was every means taken to find the man who killed him?” Eve asked.
“Every means, although there was no extra pressure put upon us. Nobody came forward to identify the victim or to claim the body. He must have been a waif and stray; his name, Smith, is one of the commonest English names, I am told, and it may have been an assumed name in his case. He was a fine young fellow, but showed marks of having lived recklessly and drunk hard. The lines in his face were the lines that dissipated habits leave on young faces. It was a sad business. Has the Signora any personal interest in this unfortunate gentleman?”
“Yes, he was my relation. I have come to Venice on purpose to find his grave.”
“That will be difficult, I fear. He belonged to nobody. His bones will have been mingled with other bones in the public grave ere now.”
“Oh, that is hard,” said Eve, in a broken voice. “A pauper’s grave. He was a gentleman by birth and education. There were those in his own country who would have starved rather than let him lie in a nameless grave.”
The official shrugged his shoulders with the true philosophical shrug.
“Does the Signora really think that it matters whether we have as grand a tomb as Titian or lie nameless and forgotten in some quiet corner? For my part, the finest monument that was ever set up would not console me for a short life. When these bones of mine are only aches and pains, and can carry me about no longer, away with them to the crematorium. The Signora will pardon me for venturing to state my own views, and if she desires it I will try to discover the exact circumstances of the Englishman’s burial. It is possible that there may have been someone interested in his last resting-place, and the grave may have been bought. There was a young Venetian, the girl who caused the quarrel, who seems to have been attached to him. She may have done something. If the Signora will be good enough to wait till tomorrow I may be able to furnish her with better information.”
Eve thanked him for his polite interest, and promised to recompense him for any trouble he might take on her behalf.
She received a letter from him the next morning.
“The grave is the last in the avenue leading due west by the side of the south wall in the cemetery at San Michele. There is a wooden cross, and the name Smith. The grave was bought and the cross erected at the expense of the Venetian girl.”
Eve’s gondola took her to the seagirt burial-place in the morning sunshine. She carried a basket of roses and narcissus, to lay upon her brother’s grave, and her mind was full of the hour when she saw him for the last time. How near in its distinctness of detail, of sensation even! how far in that sense of remoteness which made her feel as if she were looking across a gulf of death and time to another life! Was that really herself—that impetuous girl, whose arms had clung round her brother’s neck in the agony of parting, and who had never known any other love?
Today there was a conflict of feeling. There was the thought of the man whose crime had been the crime of a moment, whose punishment was the punishment of a lifetime.
“I know that he loved me,” she told herself. “I know that I was necessary to his happiness, and yet I sent him away from me. Could I do otherwise? No. The man who killed my brother could not be my husband, I knowing what he had done. Ah, as long as I did not know, what a happy woman I was! And I might have lived happy in my ignorance to the end but for my own fault.”
And then with bitterest smile she said aloud—
“Ah, Fatima, Fatima, how dearly you have paid for the turning of the key!”
She found San Michele, the quiet island of the dead, sleeping in the soft haze of morning on the bosom of the lagoon. A little way off, the chimneys of Murano were tarnishing the clear Italian sky
