“Among the passengers on board the City of Zanzibar, which left Cape Town on the 3rd inst., for Alexandria and Brindisi, were Mr. Murthwait and Mr. Vansittart, returning from a hunting expedition to Lobengula’s country.”
Eve sent for her doctor that evening, the English doctor who had attended her at St. Moritz in January and February, and who was now taking a semiprofessional holiday in Venice—willing to see old patients who might have drifted to the city in the sea, but not desiring new ones.
She submitted patiently to the necessary auscultation, while her sister stood by, pale and breathless, waiting to hear the words of doom.
The doctor’s face, when he laid down the stethoscope, was grave even to sorrowfulness. He had been warmly interested in this case in the winter, had hoped against hope.
“Am I worse than I was in February?” Eve asked quietly.
“I am very sorry to have to say it—yes, you are worse.”
“And you think badly of my case? You think it quite hopeless?”
“There is no such thing as hopelessness,” said the doctor, responding to an appealing look from Hetty. “You are so young—have such a fine constitution, and even after what you told me of your family history—who knows?—there is always a chance.”
“Yes, there was a chance for my youngest sister,” answered Eve, with a faint smile. “Peggy’s chance lasted six months.”
“If there is anything you want to settle—any business matter, such as the disposal of property, which makes your mind uneasy—it is always well to set such anxieties at rest,” answered the doctor, soothingly.
“Yes, I must see to that. My settlement gives me the right to dispose of my property—the property my husband gave me. I had none of my own. But it is not of that I am thinking. Oh, doctor, be frank with me. I have a reason for wanting to know. Do you think that I am dying?”
“Alas, dear lady! I cannot promise you many years of life.”
“Or many months? Or many weeks? Oh, doctor, don’t think I am afraid of the truth. I am not one of those consumptives who deceive themselves. I have no spurious hopes—perhaps because I do not set a great value on life. Only there is someone I want to see before I die.”
“Send for him, then,” said the doctor, divining that the someone was her husband. “Send for him, and set your mind at rest.”
“I will,” she answered resolutely, and before the doctor had left her half an hour she had written and despatched her telegram—
“John Vansittart, Steamer City of Zanzibar, Poste Restante, Brindisi.—I am at Venice, and would give much to see you on your way home.—Eve.—Danieli’s.”
The windows of Mrs. Vansittart’s salon on the entresol at Danieli’s opened upon a balcony—a balcony shaded and sheltered by a striped awning, under which Eve loved to sit at her ease, nestling among the cushions which Hetty arranged for her, on days when, in her own words, she felt hardly equal to the gondola. There had been many days since the despatch of that message to Brindisi when Eve had felt unequal to the gondola, and Hetty had by this time exhausted all the sights of Venice under the chaperonage of Benson—who gave herself as many airs as if she had been Ruskin—and had yawned as heartily in the Accademia as ever she had yawned in the National Gallery. She had wearied of Titian and Tintoretto. She had tried her hardest to admire Carpaccio, and to pin her mind to her limp little piratical edition of the Stones of Venice. She thought of Ruskin religiously every day as she tripped past Figtree Corner. More fondly, perhaps, did she affect the shops in the Merceria, and all those wonderful little streets which to the Cockney of mature years recall all that was most precious—that is to say, most characteristic of the little industries and little trades of a great city—in the vanishing alleys and paved courts between Leicester Square and Oxford Street. Here there was always something to interest the girl from Sussex; and the Rialto, market and bridge, afforded never-failing pleasure. Thus the gondolier had an easy time of it, and slept away the brightening hours, and basked in the sun, and fattened on golden messes of polenta.
It was quite true that Eve felt less capable of exertion—even that slight effort of going downstairs and stepping from Danieli’s doorstep into a gondola—than when first she came to Venice; but she had another and stronger reason for preferring her cushioned nest on the balcony to the Lido or the lagoons, lovely as those smooth waters were in the lovely May weather. She was waiting for the result of her telegram, she was watching for the coming of her husband. He would come to her. On that question she had no fear. If he lived to land at Brindisi and to receive her message, he would come to Venice. She would see him, and forgive, and be forgiven, before she died. Forgive him; forgive the wrong done to another? For her own part there had never been anything less than pardon in her mind. She had made every excuse that love can make—love, the special pleader—the infallible advocate for a criminal at the court of a woman’s conscience. She had excused his crime until it was no crime; but she had been firm in her conviction that she could not live with the man who killed her brother. Looking back now at the years of a double exile there was no wavering in her mind, no regret for what she had done. She felt only gratitude to Providence who had shortened the lonely years, and brought the end so near.
Three weeks of watching and waiting passed like a slow pensive dream—a dream of blue water—and lounging gondoliers—and flower-girls with baskets of ragged pink peonies, and the shriek and whistle of the steamer for the
