It was late in the evening before the citizen of Toledo, Ohio, and the would-be Postulant of the Sacred Heart parted from one another opposite the Jubilee Clock.
A reassuring telegram had been sent to Mrs. Seldom announcing Vennie’s return in the course of the following day.
As for the rest, all had been satisfactorily arranged. The American had displayed overpowering generosity. He seemed anxious to do penance for his obsession by the daughter, by lavishing benefactions upon the victims of the father. Perhaps it seemed to him that this was the best manner of paying back the debt, which his æsthetic imagination owed to the suggestive charms of the Nevilton landscape.
He made himself, in a word, completely responsible for the three wanderers. He would carry them off with him to the Channel Isles, and either settle them down there, or make it possible for them to cross thence to France, and from France, if so they pleased, on to Lacrima’s home in Italy. He would come to an arrangement with his bankers to have handed over definitely to Mr. Quincunx a sum that would once and for all put him into a position of financial security.
“I’d have paid a hundred times as much as that,” he laughingly assured Vennie, “to have got clear of my mix-up with that girl.”
Thus it came about that at nine o’clock on the day which followed the burial of James Andersen, Vennie, standing on the edge of the narrow wharf, between railway-trucks and hawsers, watched the ship with the red funnels carry off the persons who—under Heaven—were the chief cause of the stone-carver’s death.
As the four figures, waving to her over the ship’s side grew less and less distinct, Vennie felt an extraordinary and unaccountable desire to burst into a fit of passionate weeping. She could not have told why she wept, nor could she have told whether her tears were tears of relief or of desolation, but something in the passing of that brightly-painted ship round the corner of the little break-water, gave her a different emotion from any she had ever known in her life.
When at last she turned her back to the harbour, she asked the way to the nearest Catholic Church, but in place of following the directions given her, she found herself seated on the shingles below Brunswick Terrace, watching the in-drawing and out-flowing waves.
How strange this human existence was! Long after the last block of Leonian stone had been removed from its place—long after the stately pinnacles of Nevilton House had crumbled into shapeless ruins,—long after the memory of all these people’s troubles had been erased and forgotten,—this same tide would fling itself upon this same beach, and its voice then would be as its voice now, restless, unsatisfied, unappeased.