She found her brother’s grave, and the monument which Fiordelisa and her aunt had set up in his honour. The grave was a mound on which the grass grew tall and rank, as it grows at Torcello, above the ruins of the mother city. The monument—poor tribute of faithful poverty—was a wooden cross painted black, with an inscription in white lettering, rudely done:—
Sir Smizz
Morto a Venezia,
Martedi-Grasso, .
Below this brief description were seven of those conventional figures—in shape like a chandelier-drop—which often ornament the funeral drapery that marks the house of death. These chandelier-drops, painted white on the black ground of the cross, represented tears. They were seven, the mystic number, sacred to every Catholic mind.
These seven tears—seven heart-wounds—were all the epitaph Lisa could give to her lover. A wreath of immortelles, black with the blackness of years, hung upon the cross. It dropped into atoms as Eve touched it, was blown away upon the salt sea wind, vanishing as if it had been the spectral form of a wreath rather than the thing itself.
Eve sank on her knees in the hollow between two graves, and abandoned herself to a long ecstasy of supplication, praying not for the dead, at peace beneath that green mound where the grasshoppers were chirping, and the swift lizards gliding in and out—not for the dead, but for the man who killed him, for the conscience-burdened wanderer, under torrid suns, far from peace, and home, and all the pleasures and comforts of civilization, seeking forgetfulness in the arid desert, in the fever-haunted swamp, among savage beasts and savage men, going with his life in his hand, lying down to sleep at the end of a weary day, with the knowledge that if his campfires were not watched he might wake to find himself face to face with a lion. Oh, what a life for him to lead, for him whose days had been spent so pleasantly in the busy idleness of a man whose only occupation is the care of a small landed estate, and whose only notion of hard work is the early rising in the season of cub-hunting, or the strenuous pleasures of salmon-fishing beyond the Scottish border.
When her prayer was done—her prayer that her beloved might be sheltered and guarded by a Power which guides the forces of Nature, and bridles the neck of the lion, and can disperse the pestilence with a breath—prayer is a dead letter for those who believe less than this—Eve sat upon the grass, under her Italian umbrella, the red umbrella which all the peasants use as shelter from sun and rain, and abandoned herself to thoughts of the wanderer.
She knew more of his wanderings than she had hoped to know when Sophy’s letter from Fernhurst first told her that he was travelling with a friend in the Mashona country; thanks to an occasional letter from his own pen which appeared in the Field, and over which his wife hung with breathless interest, and read and reread, returning to it again and again long after the date of publication, as she returned to Hamlet or “In Memoriam.” Week after week she searched the paper eagerly for any new letter, or any stray paragraph giving news of the wanderer; but the letters appeared at long intervals, and the last was nearly three months old. He had turned his face homeward, he said, in that last letter. Her heart thrilled at the thought that he might have returned ere now, that he might be at Merewood perhaps, in the rooms where they had lived together, in the garden which was once their earthly Paradise, in which she had watched the growth of every flowering shrub, and counted every rose, in that mild Hampshire where roses flourish almost as abundantly as in balmy Devon. She thought of the tulip tree she had planted on their favourite lawn, he standing beside her as she bent to her work, laughingly prophetic of the day when they should sit on a rustic bench together under the spreading branches of that sapling of today, to accept the congratulations of garden-party guests upon their golden wedding.
“ ‘We must really go and speak to the old people,’ some pert young visitor would say to a perter granddaughter of the house, ‘only one hardly knows what to say to people of that prodigious age.’ ”
Eve remembered her feeling of vague wonder what it was like to be old, whilst Vansittart jestingly forecast the future.
Well, all speculation of that kind was at an end now. She would never know what it was like.
“Those the Gods love die young,” she repeated to herself, dreamily. “I would not mind dying—any more than Peggy minded, happy-souled Peggy—if I could but see him before I die. There could be no harm in my seeing him—just at the end—no treason to my flesh and blood lying here.”
She laid her wasted cheek upon the mound, and let her tears mix with the last lingering dew on the long grass. She wanted to be loyal to her dead; but her heart yearned with a sick yearning for one touch from the hand of the living, for one look from the eyes that would look only love. Love, and pardon, and fond regret.
It was a fortnight after that morning in the cemetery at San Michele, that in poring over her Field Eve came upon a two-line paragraph at the bottom of a column, a most obscure little paragraph—side by side with one of those little anecdotes of intensest human interest which chill one at the end by the fatal symbol, “Advt.”—a tiny scrap of news which any but the most searching
