The Venetians E-Book

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

But who cares about the chance of cold and gloom six weeks hence when to-day is fair and balmy? A hum of joyous, foolish voices echoed from those palace façades, and floated out seaward, and rang along the narrow Calle, and drifted on the winding water-ways, and resounded under the innumerable bridges; for everywhere in the City by the Sea men, women, and children were making merry, and had given themselves up to a wild and childish rapture of unreasoning mirth, ready to explode into loud laughter at the sorriest jokes. An old man tapped upon the shoulder by a swinging paper lantern—a boy whose hat had been knocked off—a woman calling to her husband or her lover across the gay flotilla—anything was food for mirth on this holiday evening, while the great gold orb sank in the silvery lagoon, and all the sky yonder towards Chioggia was dyed with the crimson afterglow, and the Chioggian fishing-boats were moving westward in all the splendour of their painted sails.

Leseprobe

THE VENETIANS

A NovelM. E. Braddon

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385748012

CHAPTER I.

IN THE CITY BY THE SEA.

Little golden cloudlets, like winged living creatures, were hanging high up in the rosy glow above Santa Maria della Salute, and all along the Grand Canal the crowded gondolas were floating in a golden haze, and all the westward-facing palace windows flashed and shone with an illumination which the lamps and lanterns that were to be lighted after sundown could never equal, burnt they never so merrily. It was Shrove Tuesday in Venice, Carnival time. The sun had been shining on the city and on the lagunes all day long. It was one of those Shrove Tuesdays which recall the familiar proverb—

“Sunshine at Carnival,

Fireside at Easter.”

But who cares about the chance of cold and gloom six weeks hence when to-day is fair and balmy? A hum of joyous, foolish voices echoed from those palace façades, and floated out seaward, and rang along the narrow Calle, and drifted on the winding water-ways, and resounded under the innumerable bridges; for everywhere in the City by the Sea men, women, and children were making merry, and had given themselves up to a wild and childish rapture of unreasoning mirth, ready to explode into loud laughter at the sorriest jokes. An old man tapped upon the shoulder by a swinging paper lantern—a boy whose hat had been knocked off—a woman calling to her husband or her lover across the gay flotilla—anything was food for mirth on this holiday evening, while the great gold orb sank in the silvery lagoon, and all the sky yonder towards Chioggia was dyed with the crimson afterglow, and the Chioggian fishing-boats were moving westward in all the splendour of their painted sails.

At Danieli’s the hall and staircase, reading-room, smoking-room, and saloons were crowded with people; English and American for the most part, but with a sprinkling of French and German. Shrewd Yankees were bargaining on the sea-washed steps below the hall-door with gondoliers almost as shrewd. Quanto per la notte—tutte la notte, sul canale? To-night the gondoliers would have it all their own way, for every one wanted a gondola to row up and down the Grand Canal, with gaudy Chinese lanterns, and singing men, twanging guitar or tinkling mandoline to that tune which is almost the national melody of Venice fin de siècle—“Funicoli, funicola.”

The dining-rooms at Danieli’s are capacious enough for all ordinary occasions, but to-night there was not space for half the number who wanted to dine. The waiters were flying about wildly, trying to appease the hungry crowd with promises of tables subito, subito. But travellers in Italy know what subito means in an Italian restaurant, and were not comforted by these assurances. Amiable Signor Campi moved about among his men, and his very presence gave comfort somehow, and finally everybody had food and wine, and a din of jovial voices rose up from the table d’hôte to the grand old rooms above, on that upper story which is called the noble floor, a place of strange histories, perhaps, in those stern days when these hotels were palaces.

The ubiquitous Signor Campi was near the door when a gondola stopped at the bottom of the steps, and two ladies came tripping up into the hall, followed by a young man who was evidently English, handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, and clad in a suit of rough grey cloth, whose every line testified to the excellence of an English tailor.

The ladies were as evidently not English, and they had a Carnival air which was totally different from the gaiety of the American young ladies in their neat tailor gowns, or the English ladies in their table d’hôte silks. One wore ruby plush, with a train which trailed on the wet steps as she came up to the door. The other wore black velvet, with a wide yellow sash loosely knotted round a supple waist. The ruby lady was masked, the black velvet lady dangled her lace-fringed mask on the end of a finger, and looked boldly round the crowded hall with her big black eyes—eyes which reflected the lamplight in their golden splendour.

Signor Campi was at the Englishman’s side before the ladies could pass the threshold.

“You were thinking of dining with those two ladies, sir?” he inquired, in excellent English.

“Certainly. You can give us a private room, if you like.”

“There is not a room in the house unoccupied;” and then, in a lower voice, Signor Campi murmured, “Quite impossible. Those ladies cannot dine here.”

The Englishman laughed lightly.

“You are not fond of your own countrywomen, it seems, Monsieur Campi;” and then to the hall-porter, “Keep that gondola, will you?” and then in Italian, to the larger lady in ruby plush, who might have been mother or aunt to the lovely girl in black velvet, “They have no room for us anywhere. We should have to wait ages, ages for our dinner. Shall we try a restaurant?”

“Yes, yes,” cried the girl eagerly. “Ever so much more fun. Let us go to the Black Hat. No gha megio casa per el disnar.”

“Where is the Black Hat?”

“On the Piazza. We often dine there, la Zia and I. We shan’t want the gondola, it is only five minutes’ walk.”

“Shall I engage him for the evening?”

“No, no. You are going to take us to the opera.”

“As you will.”

He offered the girl his arm, and left la Zia to follow him across the hall to the door opening on to the Quay of the Slaves—that quay whose stones are beaten nowadays chiefly by the footsteps of light-hearted travellers drunken with the enchantment of Venice. They crossed the bridge, the girl hanging on the young man’s arm, chatting gaily, and holding up her long black skirt with the other hand, revealing glimpses of feet and ankles which were far from fairy-like, feet that had been widened by the flip-flopping shoe which the damsel had worn when she was a lace-maker on the island of Burano.

If he wanted a good dinner—a real Venetian dinner—nowhere would he get it better than at the sign of the Black Hat, and good wine into the bargain, the girl told her cavalier.

They turned by the Vine Corner, and then threaded their way along the crowded Piazzetta, whence the sacred pigeons had been banished by the tumult of the throng. They crossed the Piazza in front of St. Mark’s Moorish domes, and entered a low doorway under the colonnade, only a few paces from the Torre del Orologio, with its ultramarine and gold clock and its bronze giants to beat the time. At the end of a long, narrow, stuffy passage, they found themselves in a low-ceiled room where there were numerous small tables, and where the heat from the flare of the gas, and the steam of cooked viands, was too suggestive of the torrid zone for comfort.

The waiters were evidently devoted to the dark-eyed Si’ora in black and yellow, for room was speedily found where there was apparently no room. Some diners were hustled away from a snug little table in a corner by a window, where by opening one side of the casement one might get a breath of cool air—flavoured by sewage, but still a boon.

“May I order the dinner?” pleaded the dark eyes, smiling at the young man in rough grey woollen, while la Zia looked about her, turning her head to survey the groups of diners at the tables in the rear.

The waiter set a huge flask of Chiante on the table unbidden, and stood, napkin in hand, waiting for Fiordelisa’s orders. Fiordelisa—otherwise Lisa—was the name of the dark-eyed damsel, who to the Englishman’s eye looked as if she had just stepped out of a story in the Decameron.

She ordered the dinner, discussing the menu confidentially with the waiter; she ordered, and the dishes came, and they all ate, Vansittart being too hungry to be daintily curious as to the food set before him after a long day on the lagoons and an afternoon on the Lido, and all the fun and riot of the Grand Canal at sunset. He never knew of what his dinner at the Black Hat was composed, except that he ate some oysters and drank a pint of white wine, and helped to finish a couple of bottles of champagne—which he ordered in lieu of the big flask of Chiante—that they began with a frittura of minnows, and that the most substantial dish which the brisk waiter brought them was a savoury mess of macaroni, with shreds of meat or choppings of liver mixed up in an unctuous gravy. Lisa was in high spirits, and ate ravenously, and drank a good many glasses of the sparkling wine, and told him, half in broken English and half in her Venetian dialect, of the old days when she had worked in the lace factory, where her earnings were about seven soldi per diem, and where she lived chiefly on polenta.

This was the sole knowledge Mr. Vansittart had of her history, since he had only made her acquaintance three or four hours ago at the concert hall on the Lido, where he had offered this young person and her aunt a cup of coffee, and whence he had brought them back to Venice in his gondola. He knew nothing of their histories and characters, cared to know nothing, had no idea of seeing them ever again after this Carnival day. He had taken them to his hotel without stopping to consider the wisdom of such a course, thinking to feast them in one of those grand upper rooms overlooking the broad sweep of water between the Quay of the Slaves and St. George the Greater, meaning to feast them upon Signor Campi’s best; but Signor Campi had willed otherwise, and here they were feasting just as merrily upon a savoury mess of macaroni and chopped liver at the sign of the Black Hat.

After the savoury dishes Fiordelisa began upon pastry, with an appetite as of a giant refreshed. She rested her elbow on the table, and the loose sleeve of her velveteen gown rolled back and showed the round white arm. All the little crinkly curls danced upon her pure white forehead and over her dancing eyes as she ate chocolate éclairs and creamy choux to her heart’s content, while Vansittart thought what a pretty creature she was, and what a pity Mr. Burgess or Mr. Logsdaile was not there with palette and brushes, to fix that gay and brilliant image upon canvas for ever.

Vansittart was not in love with this chance acquaintance of an idle afternoon. He was only delighted with her. She amused, she fascinated him, just as he was amused and fascinated by this enchanting city of Venice, which had always the same charm and the same glamour for him, come here at what season he might. She impressed him with a sense of her beauty, just as one of those wonderful pictures in the Venetian Academy would have done.

His heart was unmoved by this sensuous, eager, earthly loveliness. Her vulgarity, all her words and gestures essentially of the people, interested him, yet kept him worlds away from her.

He was rich, idle, alone in Venice, and he thought it was his right to amuse himself to the uttermost at this Carnival season. That offer of a cup of coffee, arising out of mutual laughter at some absurdities among the crowd, had been the beginning of the friendliest relations.

He strolled on the loose, level sands with Lisa and her aunt, those sands over which Byron used to ride, the poet of whose existence Lisa had never heard, yet who had wasted lightest hours with just such girls as Lisa. And then how could he go back to Venice alone in his gondola and leave this black-eyed girl and her chaperon to struggle for standing room among the crowd on the twopenny steamer, in their fine clothes and jewels, those jewels in which lower-class Venetians love to invest their savings? No; it was the most natural thing in life to offer them seats in his gondola, and then to see the fun of the Grand Canal in their company; and what young man with his note-case plethoric with limp Italian notes, and a reserve of English bank-notes in a close-buttoned inside pocket, could refrain from offering dinner, and then, hearing that Lisa was pining to go to the opera, a box at that entertainment? No sooner had she expressed her desire, while they were on the Grand Canal, than he sent off a Venetian guide, whom he knew of old, to engage a stage box for the evening.

Fiordelisa told him about her life at Burano, while she devoured her pastry, the aunt listening placidly, replete with dinner and wine, caring for nothing except that those old days were a thing of the past, and that neither she nor her handsome niece need toil or starve any more—not for the present, at any rate; perhaps never. La Zia was not a woman to peer curiously into the future while the present gave her a comfortable lodging and meat and drink.

The girl talked her Venetian, and Vansittart, who had spent most of his holidays in Italy, and had a quick ear for dialects, was able to understand her. Now and then she spoke English, better than he would have expected from her youthful ignorance.

“How is it that you can talk English, Signorina mia, and how is it that you left Burano?” he asked in Italian.

“For one and the same reason. A young English gentleman fell in love with me, and brought my aunt and me to Venice, and is having me educated, in order to marry me and take me to England with him.”

Vansittart did not believe in the latter half of the story, but he was too polite to express his doubt.

“Oh, you are being educated up to our idea of the British matron, are you, bella mia?” he said, smiling at her, as she wiped her coral lips with the coarse serviette, and flung herself back in her chair, satiated with cream and pastry. “And pray in what does the education consist?”

“I am learning to play on the mandoline. A little old man with a cracked voice comes to our lodgings twice a week to teach me—and we sing duets, ‘La ci darem’ and ‘Sul aria.’”

“The mandoline. Ah, that is your English friend’s notion of education,” said Vansittart, laughing. “Well, I dare say that it is as good as Greek or Latin, or the pure science that gave Giordano Bruno such a bad time in this very city.”

He leant back with his head in an angle of the wall, idle, amused, interested, taking life as it seemed to him life ought to be taken—very lightly.

He had been in Venice only a few days, days of sunshine and sauntering in gondolas to this or the other island, to dream away an idle afternoon. It was his third visit, and he seemed to know every stone of the city almost as well as Ruskin—every palace front and Saracenic window, every mouldering flight of steps, every keystone of every bridge which he passed under almost every day with lazy motion, drifting as the cabbage leaves and egg-shells drifted on the dark green water. He never stayed very long anywhere, being free to wander as he pleased at his present stage of existence, and having a dim foreshadowing of the time when he would not be free, when he would be bound and fettered by domestic ties, and travelling would be altogether a different business from this casual rambling. He pictured himself at the head of his breakfast table discussing the summer holiday with his wife, while perhaps his mother-in-law sat by and put various spokes into the family wheel, opposing every preference of his on principle.

He would have to marry some day, he knew. It was an obligation laid upon him together with the family seat and comfortable income to which he had succeeded before his two-and-twentieth birthday. The thing would have to be done—but he meant to delay the evil hour as long as he could, and to be monstrously exacting as to the fairy princess for whose dear sake he should put on those domestic fetters.

He had enjoyed this particular visit to Venice with a keener relish than either of his previous visits. Though the year was still young, the weather had been exceptionally lovely. Sun, moon, and stars had shed all that they have of glory and of glamour over the romantic city, painting the smooth lagoons with a rare splendour of colouring which changed city and sea into something supernal, unimaginable, dreamlike.

His windows at Danieli’s looked over an enchanted sea, where the great modern Peninsular and Oriental steamer moored between the Riva and St. George the Greater seemed an anachronism in iron. All else was fairy-like, historic, mediæval.

The steamer was to sail for Alexandria in the afternoon, they had told him, whenever he made any inquiry about her; but the days and afternoons had gone, and she was still lying there, blocking out a little bit of the opposite island and the famous church.

“And so you sing as well as play, Fiordelisa?” he asked, presently, after a silence in which they all three smoked their cigarettes.

“Sing! I should think she did sing,” answered the aunt. “She warbles like a nightingale. Signor Zefferino, her master, says she ought to come out at the opera.”

Vansittart smiled. Idle flattery on the maestro’s part, no doubt; the flattery of the small parasite who knows where the macaroni is savouriest, and where the salad reeks with oil.

And yet, if this girl sang at all, she should sing sweetly. Those dark, sunny eyes of hers gave promise of the artistic temperament. The tones that came from that round, full throat, ivory white against the tawdry black and yellow of her gown, should be rich and ripe.

He asked no questions about her English lover. Had he been ever so little in love with her himself he would have been full of curiosity—but for this flower of a day, this beautiful stranger, with whom he ate and drank and made merry to-night, and whom he might never see again, he had no serious concern. He cared not who were her friends or followers; whether the life she lived were good or evil. She had a fresh youthfulness, a look of almost childlike innocence, in spite of her tousled hair and tawdry raiment, and although Signor Campi’s keen eye had condemned her. The aunt, too, fat, common, too fine for respectability, seemed a harmless old thing. No word of evil had come from her lips. She had not the air of laying snares for the stranger’s feet. She thought of nothing but the enjoyment of the moment.

“Pray, where may your Englishman be to-day?” asked Vansittart, as it flashed upon his idle mind that there might be peril in such a city as Venice in being seen with another man’s sweetheart. “Why didn’t he escort you to the Lido?”

“He went to Monte Carlo a fortnight ago,” she answered. “I am afraid he is a gambler.”

“Is he rich?”

“No, not as you English count riches. He is rich for a Venetian. He gave la Zia and me our gowns—she chose red, I black—last Christmas. There are few Venetians who would give such handsome presents. He is very generous.”

“Yes, he is very generous,” echoed the aunt.

“It is time we went to the opera,” cried Fiordelisa. “I want to be there at the beginning.”

The opera was “Don Giovanni;” the artists were third-rate; but they sang well enough to lull la Zia into a comfortable slumber and to lift Lisa to the seventh heaven. She sat with clasped hands, listening in a rapture of content. She only unclasped her hands to applaud vehemently when the house applauded. The theatre was crowded, the audience were noisy, but Fiordelisa craned her long neck out of the box to listen, and drank in every note with those quick ears of hers, and was perhaps almost the only person in the Rossini Theatre that night who listened intently: but before the second act was over the crowd and the heat had increased to such a degree that women were fainting in the boxes, and even Fiordelisa was resigned to leaving before “Don Giovanni” was half done. She wanted to walk in the Piazza before the shops were shut, or the crowd began to thin, or the bands ceased playing.

There was to be a masked ball at the same theatre on the following night.

“Shall I take you to the ball, Lisa?” asked Vansittart, as they came out of the heat and the glare into the cool softness of a Venetian night.

“No, I don’t care about dancing. I only care for the opera. The girls at Burano were mad about dancing, but I liked to hear the organ at High Mass better than all their dances.”

Vansittart thought of bidding his new friends good night at the door of the theatre. Had Venice not been Venice, and had there been any vehicles in waiting, he would have put his fair companions into a coach, paid their fare, and bade them good night for ever, without so much as inquiring where they lived. But Venice has a romantic unlikeness to every other city. There was no coach. To say good night and leave them to walk home unescorted was out of the question.

“In which direction is your house, Signora?” he asked the elder lady.

“Oh, we are not going home,” cried Fiordelisa. “We are going to the Piazza. This is the time when there will be most fun. You’ll take us, won’t you?” she asked, slipping her hand through his arm, and boldly taking possession of him. “Come, come, aunt, we are going to the Piazza.”

Her feet threaded the narrow ways so swiftly that Vansittart scarcely knew by which particular windings of the labyrinth they came to the Bocca di Piazza, and emerged from the shadow of the pillars upon the broad open square, all aflame with lamps and lanterns, and one roar of multitudinous voices, squeaking punchinellos, barking dogs, blaring trumpets, tinkling guitars. They pushed their way through the crowd, the two women masked, each hanging on to his arm, and making progress difficult.

The Piazza was a spectacle to remember, full of life and movement, a military band braying out brazen music, music of Offenbach, loud, martial, insistent, above the multifarious squeakings and shoutings, the laughter and the clamour of the crowd. In the long colonnades the throng pushed thickly; but Vansittart had been one of the strong men of the ’Varsity, a thrower of hammers, a jumper of long jumps, a man with a name that was famous at Lillie Bridge as well as at Oxford. He parted the throng as if it had been water, and would have made his way quickly to the brightest, largest, and gayest of the caffès, if it had not been for Lisa, who hung back to look at the lighted shop windows, windows that she could have seen any night of her life, but which had a particular attraction at Carnival time.

The touters were touting at the shop doors, with that smiling persistence which makes the Procuratie Vecchie odious, and recalls Cranbourne Alley in the dark ages. Lisa made a dead stop before a shop where gaudy wooden figures of Moorish slaves, garish with crude colour and much gilding, were grilling in the glare of the gas. It was a kind of bazaar, half Venetian, half Oriental, and one window was full of bead necklaces and barbaric jewels. At these Lisa looked with such childish longing eyes that Vansittart would have been hard as a stone if he had not suggested making a selection from that sparkling display of rainbow glass and enamel.

The spider at the door was entreating the flies to go into his web, a young Venetian with smiling black eyes and a Jewish nose—a lineal descendant of Jessica, perhaps—a very agreeable young spider, entreating the Signora and Signorina to go in and look about them. There would be no necessity for them to buy. “To look costs nothing.”

They all three went in. Fiordelisa fastened upon a tray of jewels, and lost herself in a bewilderment as to which of all those earrings, brooches, and necklaces she most desired. Vansittart was interested in the Moorish things—the bronze cups, the gold and scarlet slippers, the embroidered curtains, and, most of all, the daggers, of which there were many curious shapes, in purple-gleaming Damascus steel.

While Fiordelisa and her aunt were choosing brooches and necklaces—necklaces which by a double twist became bracelets—Vansittart was cheapening daggers, and, as a young man of ample means, ended by buying the dearest and perhaps the best, a really serviceable knife, in a red velvet sheath.

He paid for as many things as Lisa cared to choose; for a bead necklace and an enamel brooch; for a square of gold-striped gauze to twist about her head and shoulders; for a dainty little pair of Moorish shoes which might admit Lisa’s toes, but which would certainly leave the major part of her substantial foot out in the cold; for a gilded casket to hold her jewels—for a fan—for a gilt thimble—and for a little set of Algerian coffee-cups for her aunt.

All these things were to be sent next morning to the Signora’s lodgings near the Ponte di Rialto. Vansittart paid the bill, which disposed of a good many of his limp Italian notes, put his dagger in his breast-pocket, and left the shop, cutting short the compliments and thanks of the Venetian youth.

The Caffè Florian—of which tradition tells that it closeth not day or night, winter or summer—was filled with people and ablaze with light. Lisa pushed her way to a table, making good use of those fine shoulders and elbows of hers, and a little group of men who had finished their coffee got up and made way for the brilliant black eyes, and the red lips, which the little velvet mask did not hide. Those finely moulded lips looked all the lovelier for the fringe of lace that shadowed them, and the white teeth flashed as she smiled her thanks.

She talked loud, and laughed gaily while she sipped her chocolate. Vansittart himself was somewhat exhilarated by champagne, music, and two or three little glasses of cognac taken between the acts at the Rossini Theatre, and he was unashamed of his companion’s laughter and general exuberance, even although she was attracting the attention of every one within earshot. Beauty and vivacity are not attributes to make a man ashamed of his companion, although she may be only a Burano lace-maker disguised in a tawdry velvet gown.

“Show me the dagger you chose after all your bargaining,” she said, leaning over towards him, with her elbows on the table.

He obeyed. She drew the dagger from its sheath and looked at it critically. The red velvet sheath, embroidered with gold, took her fancy much more than the damascened blade.

“It is too heavy to wear in one’s hair,” she said, throwing down the sheath, and taking up the weapon.

“Take care. The blade is as sharp as a razor. It is not by any means an ornament for a lady’s toilette table. I bought it against an excursion to the Zambesi, which I have been thinking about for the last two years.”

“The Zambesi,” she repeated wonderingly; “is that in Italy?”

“No, Signorina. It is on the Dark Continent.”

She had never heard of the Dark Continent, but she only shrugged her shoulders, incuriously, and leant further across the table to examine a black pearl pin, shaped something like a death’s head, which Vansittart wore in his tie, and thus brought her smiling lips very near his face.

While she leant thus, with the tip of her finger touching the pearl, and her eyes lifted interrogatively, a heavy hand was laid upon Vansittart’s shoulder, and he was half twisted out of his chair—tilted after the manner of chairs on which young men sit—by sheer brute force on the part of the owner of the hand.

“Come out of that!” said a voice that was thickened by drink.

Vansittart was on his feet in an instant, facing a man as tall as himself, and a good deal more bulky—a son of Anak, sandy-haired, pallid, save for red spots on his cheek-bones, spots that burnt like flame.

He was scowling savagely, breathless with rage. Lisa had risen as quickly as Vansittart, and Lisa’s aunt had moved towards the new-comer in evident trouble of mind.

“Signor Giovanni,” she faltered, “who would have thought to see you in Venice to-night?”

“Not you, evidently, you wicked old hag—nor you, hussy!” cried the man, furious with jealousy and drink. “I’ve caught you at your games, have I, you good-for-nothing slut! You couldn’t stay indoors like a decent woman, but you must needs walk the streets late at night with this Cockney cad here.”

“Take care what you say to her—or to me,” said Vansittart, in that muffled bass which means a dangerous kind of anger.

He put his arm round Fiordelisa, drawing her towards him as if she belonged to him and it were his place to guard her from every assailant. The crowd made a ring about them, looking on, amused and interested, with no thought of interference which might spoil sport. The comedy some of them had seen at the Goldoni Theatre that night was not half so amusing as this bit out of the comedy of real life—the cosmopolitan comedy of human passion.

“You infernal blackguard!” cried the stranger, trying to tear the girl from Vansittart’s protecting clasp; “I’ll teach you to carry on with my——”

A foul word finished the sentence: a blow from Vansittart, straight in the stranger’s teeth, punctuated it. Then came other foul words, and other blows; and the men were grappling each other like pugilists fighting for the belt. The unknown was of heavier build, and showed traces of former training, but Vansittart was in much better condition, and was nearer sobriety, though by no means sober. He had the best of it for some minutes, till the other man by sheer brute force flung him against the table, crashing down among the shattered glasses and coffee-cups, and dealt him a savage blow below the belt, kicking him as he struck.

The table reeled over and Vansittart fell. Under his open hand as it struck the floor he felt, the unsheathed dagger which Fiordelisa had flung down, in careless indifference, after deciding that it was too big for an ornament.

Infuriated by that foul blow, maddened by the brutality of the attack, excited to fever heat by the surrounding circumstances, even by the very atmosphere, which reeked with tobacco and brandy, Vansittart sprang to his feet, clutched his foe by the collar, and plunged the dagger into his breast. In the moment of doing it the thing seemed natural, spontaneous, the inevitable outcome of the assault that had been made upon him. In the next moment, as those angry eyes grew dim, and the man fell like a log, Vansittart felt himself a coward and a murderer.

A sudden silence came upon the crowd, tumultuous a moment ago. A silence fell upon the scene, like a dull, grey veil, gauzy, impalpable, that had dropped from the ceiling.

“Dead,” muttered a voice at Vansittart’s elbow, as the man lay in the midst of them, motionless. “That knife went straight to the heart.”

A shriek rent the air, wild and shrill, and the vibrating glasses echoed it with a banshee scream. Lisa flung herself upon the body, and tried to staunch the bubbling blood with her poor wisp of a handkerchief. A man pushed his way through the crowd with an authoritative air—a doctor, doubtless; but before he reached the little clear space where the victim lay with Lisa crouching over him, and Lisa’s aunt wringing her hands and appealing to the Madonna and all the Saints, a rough hand pulled Vansittart’s arm, and a man whispered in Italian, “Run, run, while you have the chance!”

“Run?” Yes, he was a murderer, and his life belonged to the law, unless he used his heels to save his neck. Quick as lightning he took the hint, clove his way through the crowd, and made a dash for the door nearest the Piazzetta. The crowd were busy watching the doctor as he knelt beside that prostrate form—interested, too, in Fiordelisa, with her mask flung off, her loosened hair falling about her ivory neck, her dark eyes streaming, her red lips convulsed and quivering. Vansittart was at the door, past it, before a man cried—

“Stop him; stop the assassin.”

There was a sudden tumult, and twenty men were giving chase, a pack of human bloodhounds, perhaps as much for the sake of sport as from actual horror at the deed. They rushed along the Piazzetta, knocking down more than one astonished lounger on their way. They made for the Pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore—for that spot where of old the Republic put her felons to death, and where now the gondolas wait in sunshine and in starshine for the holiday visitors in the dream-city.

He would make for the water naturally, and jump on board the first gondola he could find, thought his pursuers; but when they reached the quay there was not a gondola to be seen. The gondoliers had all got their fares to-night, and all the gondolas were on the Grand Canal, with flaunting paper lanterns flying at their beaked prows, and coloured fires burning, and mandolines and guitars tinkling and twanging, and “Funicoli, funicola,” echoing from boat to boat.

“We shall have him!” cried the foremost of that yelping pack, and even as he spoke they all heard the sound of a great splash, by the steps yonder, and knew their quarry had taken to the water.

The Venetians, warm with macaroni and wine, and in no humour for an improvised bath under those starlit ripples, pulled up, and began to chatter; then whistled and shouted for gondolas, hopelessly, as to the empty air; and anon, by common consent, ran to the bridge hard by the furthermost corner of the Doge’s Palace, and from that vantage point looked over the water.

It was covered with holiday craft. Far as the eye could see the gaily decked boats were crossing and recrossing the broad reach between the Riva and the island church, and in the midst of them, like a sea-girt fortress, rose the dark hulk of the P. and O. steamer, her lights showing bright and high above those fantastical Chinese lanterns, her boilers throbbing, her cables groaning, all prepared for instant departure.

There was a deep-toned blast of the steamer’s whistle, the clamour of the donkey engines suddenly ceased, and the beating of the screw lashed up the water: and, lo, all the gondolas were tossed and swung about like a handful of rose-leaves on a running brook.

“She’s off!” cried one of Vansittart’s pursuers, almost forgetting the chase in the pleasures of watching that big ship getting under way.

“Do you think he could have got on board her?” asked another; “he” meaning their quarry.

“Not he, unless he were a better swimmer than ever I knew.”

He was a better swimmer than anybody among that Venetian’s acquaintance—or, at any rate, he was good enough to swim out to the P. and O. steamer and to get himself on board her before the engines began to beat the water with their first deliberate pulsations. The last boat had left the side of the vessel; the sailors were drawing up the accommodation ladder, as he called to them with a voice of command which they did not question. In three or four minutes he was on deck, and had made his way, dripping as he was, to the captain of the vessel.

He explained himself briefly. He had got into a row—a Carnival frolic only—and wanted to get clear of Venice, and knowing the steamer was to sail for Alexandria that night, had swum out to her at the last moment. He had plenty of money about him, and as for change of clothes, he must do the best he could.

“I hope it wasn’t anything very bad,” said the captain doubtfully, looking at this dripping stranger from top to toe.

“Oh no; a man hit me in a caffè just now, and I hit him.”

The steamer was imperceptibly moving seaward at every steady throb of those ponderous engines, threading her way along the tortuous channel so slowly and cautiously at first that Vansittart wondered if she were ever going to get away. Venice the lamplit, the starlit, the beautiful, glided into the distance, with all her domes and pinnacles, her gondolas and Chinese lanterns, torches and sky-rockets, music and laughter. Vansittart’s heart ached as he watched the fairy city fading like a vision of the night. He had loved her so well—spent such happy, light, unthinking days upon those waters, in those labyrinthine streets, laughing and chaffering with the little merchants of the Rialto, following Venetian beauty through the mazy ways and over the innumerable bridges—happy, uncaring. And now he was an escaped murderer, and would never dare to show his face in Venice again. “Good God!” he said to himself, in a stupor of horrified shame, “that I, a gentleman, should have used a knife—like a Colorado miner, or a drunken sweep in Seven Dials!”

CHAPTER II.

AFTER-THOUGHTS.

There was nothing but fair weather for the P. and O. steamer Berenice between Venice and Alexandria—fair weather and a calm sea; and John Vansittart had ample leisure in which to think over what he had done, and to live again through all the sensations of his last night in Venice.

He had to live through it all again, and again, in those long days at sea, out of sight of land, with nothing between him and his own dark thoughts but that monotony of cloudless sky and rolling waters. What did it matter whether the boat made eighteen or twenty knots an hour, whether progress were fast or slow? Each day meant an eternity of thought to him who sat apart in his canvas chair, staring blankly eastward, or brooding with bent head, and melancholy eyes fixed on the deck, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, irritated and miserable when some officious fellow-passenger insisted upon plumping down by his side in another deck chair, and talking to him about the weather, or his destination, with futile questionings as to whether this was his first voyage to the East, and all the idle inquisitiveness of the traveller who has nothing to do, and very little to think about.

Captain and steward had been very good to him. The former had asked him no questions after that first inquiry, content to know that he was a gentleman, and had a well-filled purse; the latter had put him to bed in the most comfortable of berths, and had given him a hot drink, and dried his clothes ready for the next morning. And in that one suit of clothes, with changes of linen borrowed from the captain, he made the voyage to Alexandria in the bright spring weather, under the vivid blue that canopies the Mediterranean. Perhaps the fact of living in that one suit of clothes all through those hot days intensified his sense of being a pariah among the other passengers; he who had come among them with a hand red with murder.

Hour after hour he would sit in his corner of the deck, always the most secluded spot he could find, and brood over the thing that he had done.

He had an open book upon his knee for appearance’s sake, and pretended to be absorbed in it whenever a curious saunterer passed his way. He smoked all day long for comfort’s sake, the only comfort possible for his troubled brain, and all day long he thought of his last evening in Venice and the thing that he had done there.

To think that he, a gentleman by birth and education, should have slain a man in a tavern row; that he, who in his earliest boyhood had been taught to use his fists, and to defend himself after the manner of Englishmen, should have yielded to a tigerish impulse, and stabbed an unarmed foe to the heart! He, the well-bred Englishman, had behaved no better than a drunken Lascar.

He scorned—he hated—himself for that blind fury which had made him grip the weapon that accident had placed in his way.

He was not particularly sorry for the man he had killed; a violent, drunken brute, who for the sake of the rest of humanity was better dead than alive. A profligate who had betrayed that lovely ignoramus under a promise of marriage, a promise which he had never meant to keep. He hated himself for the manner of the brute’s death rather than for the death itself. If he had killed the man in fair fight he would have felt no regret at having made an end of him; but to have stabbed an unarmed man! There was the sting, there was the shame of it. All night long, between snatches of troubled sleep, he writhed and tossed in his berth, wishing that he were dead, wondering whether it were not the best thing he could do to throw himself overboard before daybreak and so make an end of these impotent regrets, this maddening reiteration of details, this perpetual representation of the hateful scene, for ever beginning and ending and beginning again in his tortured brain.

He would have decided upon suicide, perhaps, not having any strong religious convictions at this stage of his existence; but his life was not his own to fling away, however unpleasant he might have made it for himself.

He had a mother who adored him, and to whom he, for his part, was warmly attached. She was a widow, and he was the head of the house, sole master of the estate, and to him she looked for dignity and comfort. Were he to die the landed property would pass to his uncle, a dry old bachelor, and though his mother would still have her income, she would be banished from the house in which her wedded life had been spent, and she would be the loser in social status. He had an only sister, too, a fair, frivolous being, of whom, in a lesser degree, he was fond; a sister who had made her appearance in Society at the pre-Lenten Drawing-Room, and had been greatly admired, and who was warranted to make a good match.

Poor little Maud! What would become of Maud if he were to throw himself off a P. and O. steamer? Think of the scandal of it. And yet, if he lived, and that brutal business in the Venetian caffè were to be brought home to him—murder, or manslaughter—it would be even worse for his sister. Society would look askance at a girl with such a ruffian for a brother—an Englishman who used the knife against his fellow-man. Daggers and stilettos might be common wear among Venetians; but the knife was not the less odious in the sight of an Englishman because he happened to be in a city where traditions of treachery and secret murder were interwoven with all her splendour and her beauty. It would be horrible, humiliating, disgraceful for his people if ever that story came to be known—a choice topic for the daily papers, with just that spice of romance and adventure which would justify exhaustive treatment.

Thinking over the question from the Society point of view—and in most of the great acts of life Society stands with the modern Christian in the place which the religious man gives his Creator—Vansittart told himself that every effort of his intelligence must be bent upon dissociating himself from that tragedy in the Venetian caffè. He had got clear of the city by a wonderful bit of luck; for had the steamer started five minutes earlier, or a quarter of an hour later, escape that way would have been impossible.

He had heard the men giving chase on the Piazzetta as he jumped from the quay; heard them shouting when he was in the water. Had the steamer been stationary those men would have boarded her, and the whole story would have been known. She had weighed anchor in the nick of time for him. But what then? A telegram to the police at Brindisi or Alexandria might stop him, as other fugitive felons are caught every month in the year—men who get clear off at Liverpool, to be arrested before they step ashore at New York.

He paid his passage on the morning after his flight, and gave his name as John Smith, of London. The captain scrutinized him rather suspiciously on hearing that name of Smith; but Vansittart did not look like a swindler or a blackguard. He was under a cloud, perhaps, the captain thought, and Smith was most likely an alias; but anyhow he was a gentleman, and the captain meant to stand his friend.

“Are you going to stay long in Cairo?” he asked Vansittart, when they were within sight of Alexandria.

“Not long. Perhaps only till I get my luggage. I shall go up the Nile.”

“You’ll find it rather hot before you’ve been a long way.”

“Oh, I don’t mind heat. I’m not a feverish subject,” said Vansittart, lightly, having no more idea of going up the Nile than of going to the moon.

“You’ll stop at Sheppard’s, of course?”

“Yes, decidedly. I’m told it’s a very good hotel.”

While they were nearing their port he contrived to get a good deal of information about the steamers that touched there. He meant to get off on the first boat that sailed after he landed. All the interval he wanted was the time to buy some ready-made clothes and a valise, so that he might not appear on board the homeward-bound steamer in the miserable condition in which he had introduced himself to the captain of the P. and O.

He parted with that officer with every expression of friendliness.

“I shan’t forget how good you’ve been to a traveller in distress,” he said lightly; “you may not hear of me for a month or two, perhaps. I may be up the Nile——”

“Take care of the climate,” interjected the captain.

“But as soon as I go back to London I shall write to you. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Smith, and good luck to you for a fine swimmer wherever you go.”

“Oh, I won a cup or two at Oxford,” answered the other. “We rather prided ourselves on our swimming in my set.”

He went to a restaurant where he could sit under an awning and read the latest papers that had found their way to Alexandria. There were plenty of Paris papers—Galignani, Le Figaro, Le Temps. There was a Turin paper, very stale—and there was a copy of the Daily Telegraph that had been left by some traveller, and which was a fortnight old. Nothing to fear there. Vansittart breathed more freely, and thought of going on to Cairo. But second thoughts warned him that Cairo was very English, and that he might meet some one he knew there. Better to stick to his first plan, and go back to England by the first steamer that would take him.

He had to think of his possessions at Danieli’s, and whether the things he had left there would provide a clue to his identity. He thought not. He had not given his name to the hall porter.

The hotel was crowded, and he had—like a convict—been simply known as “150,” the number of his room.

Clothes, portmanteau, dressing-bag, bore only his initials, J. V. He had been travelling in lightest marching order; carrying no books save those which he picked up on his way, no writing materials, except the compact little case in his dressing-bag. It was his habit to destroy all letters as soon as he had read them—even his mother’s, after a second or third reading. His card-case, note-case, and purse were all in his pockets when he made the plunge. No, he had left nothing at Danieli’s; nor had he left Danieli’s deep in debt, for he had paid his account on Tuesday morning, with a half-formed intention of starting for Verona by the early train on Wednesday. He could resign himself to the loss of portmanteau and contents, and the plain pigskin bag, which had seen good service and had been scraped and battered upon many a platform.

Reflection told him that he had nothing to fear from the newspapers yet awhile, since no newspaper could have travelled faster than the steamer that had brought him, while the news of that homicide at Venice was hardly important enough to be telegraphed to any Egyptian journal. No, he was safe so far; but he told himself that the best thing he could do was to get back to England and the wilderness of London; while the Berenice and her good-natured captain went on to Bombay, where, no doubt, the captain would read of that fatal brawl in the Venetian caffè, and identify his passenger as the English tourist who had stabbed another man to death.

Vansittart pulled himself together, counted his money, and rejoiced at finding that he had enough for his voyage home, and a trifle over for incidental expenses and a small outfit. The greater part of his money was in English bank-notes, about which no questions would be asked.

He went to the steamboat office, and found that there was a P. and O. boat leaving that night for London, so he took his passage on board her, selected his berth, and then drove off to an outfitter’s to get his kit, and a new cabin trunk, just big enough to hold his belongings. He bought a few French novels, and those small necessities of life without which the civilized man feels himself a savage.

His ship sailed at midnight. He was on board her early in the evening, pacing the deck in the balmy night, and looking at the lighted town, the massive quays, which testify to English enterprise, the Pharos sending out its long lines of bright white light seaward—the gigantic breakwater—all that makes the Egyptian port of to-day in some wise worthy of the Alexandria of old, when her twin obelisks stood out against the sky, and when her name meant all that was grandest in the splendour of the antique world.

Vansittart looked at the starlit sky and lamplit city with a dull unobservant gaze, while the burden upon his mind deadened his sense of all things fair and strange, and made him indifferent to scenes which would once have aroused his keenest interest. How often he had dreamed his summer daydream of Egypt, lying on a velvet lawn in Hampshire, with a volume of old Herodotus, or some modern traveller, flung upon the grass beside him, in the idlesse of a July afternoon! How often he had promised himself a long winter in that historic land! He had not much of the explorer’s ardour in those boyish days, no bent towards undiscovered watersheds and unpleasant encounters with blackamoors, no ambition to be reckoned amongst the mighty marksmen of the world, or to be called the father of lions; though in some vague visions he had fancied himself wandering in that lone land where the Zambesi leaps headlong into the fathomless gorge, in blinding whiteness of foam and deafening thunder of sound, a beauty and a terror to eye and ear. The things he most wanted to see were the things that his fellow-men had made, the palaces and statues, and fortresses and tombs that mean history. He was not a naturalist or a scientific traveller, had no hope of making the world any richer by his discoveries, or of reading the smallest paper at the Geographical Society. He wanted to see men and cities, and all splendid memorials of past ages, for his own pleasure and amusement; and Egypt was one of the countries to which he had looked for delight, if ever satiety and weariness should overtake him amidst the nearer delights of his beloved Italy.

And, behold, to-day he had walked those Egyptian streets, and let those Egyptian faces pass by him, with eyes that saw not, and with a mind that felt no interest in the things the eyes looked at. The distress in his thoughts, the perpetual labouring of his troubled mind, would not allow of pleasure in anything. That aching agony of remorse had taken hold of him, and left room for no other feeling. To the end of his life all that was picturesque and individual in this Egyptian seaport would be part and parcel of his self-humiliation, associated for ever with the thought that he had slain a fellow-creature, under circumstances for which he could find no excuse.

Again and again, as he paced the deck in the starlight, the face of the man he had killed stood out against the deep azure of the sky and sea, as it had looked at him in that awful moment when one last ejaculation, “God!” broke from the parted lips, and the man fell as if struck by a thunderbolt. There was scarcely any change in his face as he fell—no ghastly pallor, no convulsion of the features. As he lay there looking up at the ceiling, one might hardly have thought him dead. No torrent of blood rushed from those parted lips. The stream ebbed slow and dull from the pierced heart. That savage thrust of the dagger had done its work well. How many daggers and what a gory butchery had been needed to make an end of Cæsar; and behold this man was done for with one movement of an angry hand. For John Vansittart murder had been made easy.

The homeward voyage seemed ever so much longer than the outward, and the gloom of his mind deepened as the summer days wore out; summer, for it was summer here on the Mediterranean, whatever season it might seem in London, summer at Genoa, summer all along the Riviera, where the mimosas flung their fairy gold across the villa gardens, and the lateen sails shone dazzling white in the vivid sun, and the berceaus were beginning to clothe themselves with young vine leaves, unfolding out of crumpled woolly greyness into tender, translucent green.

He thought of Fiordelisa, and his thoughts of her were bitterest of all. He could not doubt that he had robbed her of her protector, the man whose purse provided for the little household of which she and her aunt had talked so gaily. It might be that he had left her to starve—or worse. Was it likely she would ever go back to Burano, and her lace-work, and her threepence-halfpenny a day, and her slipshod shoes, and her polenta, after having tasted the flesh-pots of Venice, the pallid asparagus and fat cauliflowers from the market in the Rialto, the savoury messes at the sign of the Black Hat? Would she go back and be a peasant again, after trapesing the Piazzetta in her flashy black and yellow gown, and sitting in a lantern-lit gondola, and twanging on her mandoline?

His experience of her sex and degree inclined him to think that she would not return to the old laborious life, with its hardships and privations. The first step upon the broad high-road of sin having been taken, there would be but little scruple about the second; and those bold, beautiful eyes, that swan throat and graceful form, would belong to somebody else. The easy-going aunt would hardly stand in the way of a new settlement, when the last of their poor possessions had been carried to the Monte di Pietà, and hunger was at hand. Somebody else would pay the little old singing-master, and listen admiringly while Lisa sang to the wiry tinkling of her mandoline; and the lanterns would swing from the beak of the gondola in the festival evenings, and the rockets would shoot up through the purple night in front of Santa Maria della Salute, and all the palaces on the Grand Canal would shine rosy red, reflecting the Bengal fires, and Lisa would forget her murdered man, while those substantial feet of hers tripped gaily down the brimstone path.

If that tall, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man had lived he might have kept his promise and married her. Who is to be sure that he would not? There are men in the world who will wed the girl they love, be she barmaid or ballet-dancer; and that this man was fond of Fiordelisa there could be little doubt. His savage jealousy indicated the passionate force of the civilized savage’s love.

Alas for Fiordelisa, widowed in the very morning of life! He who had wrecked her fortune could do nothing to help her. He dared not stretch out his hand towards her. His interest, for the sake of others as well as for his own sake, lay in severing every link that could connect him with the catastrophe of that fatal night. No, he could do nothing for Fiordelisa. He would not have grudged her the half of his income; and he dared not send her so much as a ten-pound note! She must sink or swim.

The thought of her peril doubled the sum of his remorse.

He landed at Marseilles, and here, too, it was summer—summer at her brightest, with azure skies, and a sea deeper, bluer, more darkly glorious than the lapis lazuli in a jewelled châsse. The streets were full of traffic and abloom with flower-girls, noisily pressing their bunches of roses and pale Parma violets upon him as he walked up the Rue de la Cannebière on his way from the quay to the railway hotel. There had been a time when the sights and sounds of that southern port were like strong wine, exhilarating, delighting him, when he could not have too much of the animation and picturesqueness of the place, the Corniche road, the wide-stretching bay with rocks and lighthouses, the sea marks of every kind, and that glittering point where the waterways divide—to the left for Hindostan, China, Japan; to the right for the New World and the setting sun; two paths upon the trackless blue that seemed each to lead direct to fairyland.

And behold he had come from the land of glamour and mystery, from the tombs of the Pharaohs, from the ashes of Cleopatra, heart-weary, caring for nothing.

He went into one of the big caffès on his right hand, seated himself at a table in an obscure corner, and began to examine the papers, hastily turning them over one after another, worried by the sticks to which they were fastened. Yes, here it was, in the Paris Figaro.