“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.