In the morning she got an answer that seemed to excite her, and that afternoon she left; and the next I heard of her was a paragraph in the newspaper, headed—“Death of the Marchioness of Appleford. Sad accident.” It seemed she had gone for a row on one of the Italian lakes with no one but a boatman. A squall had come on, and the boat had capsized. The boatman had swum ashore, but he had been unable to save his passenger, and her body had never been recovered. The paper reminded its readers that she had formerly been the celebrated tragic actress, Caroline Trevelyan, daughter of the well-known Indian judge of that name.
It gave me the blues for a day or two—that bit of news. I had known her from a baby as you might say, and had taken an interest in her. You can call it silly, but hotels and restaurants seemed to me less interesting now there was no chance of ever seeing her come into one again.
I went from Paris to one of the smaller hotels in Venice. The missis thought I’d do well to pick up a bit of Italian, and perhaps she fancied Venice for herself. That’s one of the advantages of our profession. You can go about. It was a second-rate sort of place, and one evening, just before lighting-up time, I had the salle-à-manger all to myself, and had just taken up a paper when I hears the door open, and I turns round.
I saw “her” coming down the room.
There was no mistaking her. She wasn’t that sort.
I sat with my eyes coming out of my head till she was close to me, and then I says:
“Carrots!” I says, in a whisper like. That was the name that come to me.
“‘Carrots’ it is,” she says, and down she sits just opposite to me, and then she laughs.
I could not speak, I could not move, I was that took aback, and the more frightened I looked the more she laughed till “Kipper” comes into the room. There was nothing ghostly about him. I never see a man look more as if he had backed the winner.
“Why, it’s ’Enery,” he says; and he gives me a slap on the back, as knocks the life into me again.