“There is no question of the past between you and me,” she said, “only love, a world of love.”
He drew her to his breast again, cradling the thin cheek against his brown and bearded countenance, holding her to him as if he would hold her there against the grim assailant Death, breathing his own strong life into her as their lips met and their breath mingled. Surely between them there was life and vigour enough to ward off Death.
“My darling, my darling, my darling!”
It was all that he could say just yet. The rapture of reunion, the agony of an unspeakable dread were storming heart and mind. He felt like a man lashed to the mast in a hurricane, all the forces of Nature warring round him, unable to measure his danger or his chance of rescue.
To have her, to hold her again, loving him as of old. And then to lose her! But must he lose her? Could neither love nor science work a miracle, and snatch her from the jaws of the Destroyer?
He grew calmer presently, and they sat side by side in the deepening shadows, and began to talk to each other quietly, in soft hushed voices, while the music and the voices of the Riva mixed with their half-whispered sentences, and the footsteps went by with a gay spring in them as if all Venice were hurrying from pleasure to pleasure.
“Oh, dearest, it was time you sent for me; it was time,” he said. “You have given me a long penance. Nothing but Africa could have helped me to bear my life. In a world less full of strange hazards I must have lost patience with calamity, and made a swift and sudden end of myself. Thanks to the Dark Continent I have lived somehow, as you see, and come back a semi-savage, a creature of thews and sinews.”
“No, you are only rougher looking and browner. I can see the soul shining through your eyes. Africa has not altered that.”
“But you, dear love,” he said, with a thrill in his voice that marked the strangled sob, “you are altered. You are looking tired and ill. I am afraid you have been neglecting yourself. I shall take you to the Engadine, where we ought to have taken poor Peggy. The Riviera was a mistake. A winter at St. Moritz would have cured her. We will start tomorrow.”
She did not answer for a minute or so, but nestled nearer to him, with her wan cheek leaning against his shoulder, and her waxen fingers clasping his strong wrist, hardened and roughened by weather and toil.
“The Engadine can do nothing for me, Jack—no more than it could have done for Peggy. South or north, mountain or valley, the end would have been the same. It is our family history, Jack. We were doomed from our birth. I was sent to the Engadine last winter, and Hetty and I only left St. Moritz in March. We stayed at Varese for nearly a month, and then came here. Hetty is with me, so bright, so active, so happy; but some day perhaps she will look in the glass as I have looked, and will see the summons written on her face. Dear husband, don’t be too sorry for me. This parting must have come, even if we had escaped the other; even if I had never known what happened at Florian’s; never knelt beside my brother’s grave in the island cemetery. Let me lie near him, Jack: and whatever your future life may be—and God grant it may be rich in blessings, you have suffered enough for your sin—think of me sometimes; and sometimes, in your wanderings, go to San Michele and look upon my grave.”
He clasped her close against his heart, with a shuddering sigh.
Two days after, he took her away from the life and movement of the Riva to a palace on the Grand Canal, where the quiet of the Silent City had a soothing influence on her overwrought spirit. If any life could have been happy in which the end was so near, theirs would have been happy in that delicious beginning of the Venetian summer, a season when mere existence is a privilege. Whatever love which passeth understanding can do to smooth the last days of a fading life was done for Eve; and it may be that the footsteps of the invincible Enemy were slackened somewhat by that unsleeping watchfulness.
The end came slowly, and not ungently, and till the end her husband was her devoted nurse and companion, thinking no thought that was not of her.
Colophon
The Venetians
was published in by
M. E. Braddon.
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The cover page is adapted from
Canal in Venice, San Trovaso Quarter,
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