“He was called John Smith. Do you think that was his real name?”
“I don’t know. I never heard of any other.”
“And in all the time you were associated with him did he write no letters to English friends, nor receive letters from England?”
“None that I ever saw.”
“And after his lamentable death were there no inquiries made about him? Did no one come to Venice in search of a missing friend or relative?”
“No one. Except la Zia and me there was no one who cared—no one who was any the worse for his death. He had only us in all the world, I think.”
“But when he came first to Burano he came with people—friends—you told me.”
“He came with a party of Americans who were staying at the Hôtel de Rome. They were nothing to him. They had left Venice when he came to Burano the second time.”
“Do you know where he had been living before he came to Venice?”
“Living nowhere—wandering about the earth, he told me, like Satan. That is what he said of himself. He had been in Africa—in America. He called himself a rolling stone. He told me that it was only for my sake he was content to live six months in the same place.”
“Had he no friends in Venice?”
“None, except the people with whom he used to play cards at the caffès of an evening. Sometimes he would bring two or three strangers to our salon, and they would sit playing cards half the night, while la Zia and I used to fall asleep in a corner, and wake to find the morning light creeping in through the shutters. Sometimes he won a heap of gold in a single night, and then he was so kind, so kind, and he would give us presents, la Zia and me, and we had champagne for dinner next day. Sometimes, but not often, he had bad luck for a whole night, and that used to make him angry.”
“Did he never tell you where he was born and reared, or what kind of life he led before he took to wandering over the face of the earth?”
“Never. He did not like to talk about England or his early life.”
Never! There was no more to be heard. There was infinite relief to Vansittart’s mind in this blank history. The life he had taken was an isolated life—a bubble on the stream of time, that burst, and vanished. He had broken no mother’s heart; he had desolated no home; he had made no gap in a family circle. The man had been a worthless nomad; and his death had brought sorrow upon no one but this peasant and her kinswoman.
Their wounds were healed; their lives were made happy; and so there was an end of his crime and its consequences. Fate had been very good to him. He walked back to Charles Street with his burden so far lightened that he thought he might come eventually to forget that he had ever taken a fellow-creature’s life, that he had ever carried about with him any guilty secret.
Easter was close at hand, and he was to spend Easter at Redwold Towers, within walking distance of Eve Marchant’s cottage. Easter was to decide his fate, perhaps.
XI
“One Thread in Life Worth Spinning”
Vansittart’s heart was lighter than it had been for a long time, the day he left Charles Street for Waterloo on his way to Haslemere. He longed to see Eve Marchant, with all a lover’s longing, and he told himself that he had tested his own heart severely enough by an absence of three months, and that he had now only to discover whether the lady’s heart was in any way responsive to his own. He knew now that his love for Eve Marchant was no passing fancy, no fever of the moment; and he also told himself that if he could be fairly assured of her worthiness to be his wife, he would lose no time in offering himself as her husband. Of her father’s character, whatever it might be, of her present surroundings, however sordid and shabby, he would take no heed. He would ask only if she were pure and true and frank and honest enough for an honest man’s wife. Convinced on that point, he would ask no more.
An honest man’s wife? Was he an honest man? Was he going to give her truth in exchange for truth? Was there nothing that he must needs hold back; no secret in his past life that he must keep till his life’s end? Yes, there was one secret. He was not going to tell her of his Venetian adventure. It would grieve her woman’s heart too much to know that the man she loved had to bear the burden of another man’s blood. Nay, more, with a woman’s want of logic she might deem that impulse of a moment murder, and might refuse to give herself to a man who bore that stain upon his past.
He meant to keep his secret. He could trust Lisa not to betray him. She and her kinswoman had pledged themselves to silence; and over and above the obligation of that promise he had bound them both to him by his services, had made their lives in some wise dependent on his own welfare. No, he had no fear of treachery from them. Nor had he any fear of what the chances of time and change might bring upon him from any other belongings of the dead man—so evidently had his been one of those isolated existences which drop out
