“How happy they all are!” she said. “What a happy world it seems—for other people.”
“Ah, but you see people must wear their happy side outermost,” answered Hetty, “and I dare say even Americans know what care means, though they always seem wallowing in money and new clothes. I wish you would come down to the hall tonight, and hear the little concert we have every evening, and see my favourite young lady from Boston. She has all her frocks from Paris, and her waist is under nineteen inches. Yet she eats! Ah, what a privilege to be able to eat as much as she does, and yet keep one’s waist under nineteen inches!”
The day had been almost oppressively warm, and the fishing-boats were coming home through a sea of molten gold in the unspeakable splendour of a Venetian sunset, when May has breathed the first breath of summer heat over land and water. Eve had been sitting in the balcony all day reading those little books of Howells’ and his contemporaries, which seem especially invented for the traveller in fair countries, light, portable, dainty to touch and gracious to look upon, and eminently proper. She had read, and dreamed her waking dreams, and dozed a good deal at intervals—for her nights now were sadly broken, and sadly wakeful—quite as bad as poor Miss Margaret’s nights, as Benson told her sympathetically. Miss Margaret? Who was Miss Margaret? And then Eve remembered how the respectful Benson had insisted on calling Peggy by a name which no other lips had ever addressed to her.
Benson was an admirable nurse, wakeful, watchful, really attached to her mistress; but she was just a shade too businesslike, and too much inclined to look upon Eve as a case rather than an individual. She watched the progress of decay with a ghoulish gusto, and told her mistress more about former patients than it was cheering for an invalid to know.
Today, after the weariness of the night, and the long, long hours between sunrise and the breakfast hour of civilization, Eve’s fitful slumbers were sound and deep, deeper than dreamland, deep as the dark abyss of unconsciousness. She had been falling into this gulf now and again all day, falling suddenly from her book or her daydream into that black pit of sleep.
A cooler breeze sprang up with the sinking of the sun, and the water between the Riva and the island church was stirred into bolder ripples as the dark gondolas stood sharply out against the reddening light. The salt breath of the Adriatic was blowing across the sandy bar yonder with revivifying freshness. Eve rose from her nest of pillows in the low canvas chair, and stood leaning against the balcony, looking at the animated scene. There was a paper lantern twinkling here and there with a pale fantastic light, in sickly contrast to that blaze of sunset colour, and as the crimson faded in the low western sky the little earthly lights brightened and grew bold, and there came the sound of that light music which Venetians love, music that seems only a natural accompaniment to the ripple of the incoming tide.
“How bright and gay it all looks!” said Eve. “Is there anything on earth to equal Venice? Oh, how strange that I should love this city so well!” she murmured, in self-reproach, remembering the purpose that had brought her there.
The charm of the city had crept upon her unawares. She was glad to live there, glad that she was to die there.
She looked towards the bridge by the Doge’s Palace, and saw a man walking quickly down the steps—a bearded man, with a brown skin and a weather-beaten look. He was coming quickly towards the hotel; he was looking up at the windows, scanning the wide frontage with a sweeping glance, now high, now low, till his eyes lighted on the balcony where she stood, lighted on herself, and never unfixed their gaze.
Changed as he was, she had known him from the first instant. She had known him when he appeared at the top of the steps for John Vansittart and no other. There was something in his walk, something in the carriage of his head, something which to the eyes of love seemed to distinguish him from all the rest of the world—characteristics that might have been invisible to all other eyes.
He ran towards the low doorway, and scarcely had he vanished from the outer world below when she heard a door bang at the end of the corridor and the rush of hurrying feet. How quick, how impetuous, what a creature of fire and name he seemed as he dashed into the room and clasped her in his arms!
“Are these your African manners?” she gasped, laughing and crying in the same moment.
“Oh, my love, my love, how sweet to hold you on my heart again and be forgiven! I am forgiven, am I not, dear? My calamity, or my crime—call it what you will—is forgiven. Oh, love, I have suffered. I have drunk the cup of atonement.”
She was sobbing upon his shoulder, her face hidden, as she clung to him, with wasted arms wreathing his neck. In the blindness of his joy—for joy, like fortune, is stone blind—he had not noticed how pitiably thin those caressing arms had grown. Suddenly, scared by her silence, he withdrew himself from that caress, and held her from him at arm’s length, and, looking into her face, saw the sign manual of death, and knew why she had summoned him.
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