The Venetians

by M. E. Braddon

“What of that? Do you think I should have weighed my own love or my own happiness against my brother’s life? Do you think I would have married you if I had known the truth?”

“You would not, perhaps; and two lives would have been spoilt by your loyalty to the dead—who would sleep none the more peacefully because you and I were miserable. Did you owe him so much, this wandering brother of yours? What kindness had he ever shown you? What care had he ever taken of you?”

“He was my brother, and I loved him dearly.”

“And did not I love you, and had not I some claim upon you?” asked Vansittart, indignantly. “Could you have let me go without a tear?”

“No, no, no. I adored you from the first—yes, that first night on the snowy road, and at the ball, when you were so kind. I began to love you almost at once, foolishly, ridiculously, without a hope of being loved again. But, let my love be what it would, the love of a lifetime, it would have made no difference. Nothing would have induced me to marry the man who killed my brother. Oh, God,” she cried hysterically, “the hands that I have kissed so often—stained with Harold’s life-blood!”

“I thought as much,” said Vansittart, doggedly. “I told myself that you would not marry me if you knew my secret. I told myself that two lives would be spoilt—it was a question, perhaps, of half a century of happiness for two people, to be sacrificed because of the angry passions of one night—of one minute. The deed was done in less time than the bronze giants of the clock-tower would have taken to strike the hour. Because once in my life, for one instant, under grossest provocation, I let my temper master me—because of that one savage impulse two hearts were to be broken. I spent a night of agony deliberating this question, Eve. Mark you, it was within a few weeks of our wedding-day that your kindred with the dead man was first suggested to me.”

“You knew that you had killed a fellow-creature?”

“Yes, I knew, and I had suffered all the bitterness of a long remorse; and I had given myself absolution. And when I knew the worst, knew at least the probability that I had killed your brother, even then, after most earnest questioning, I told myself that it was best for both of us that we should marry. Our lives were our own. Neither of us was responsible to that dead man in his grave. But now, now that I see how dear he was to you, now that I know which way your heart turns, I wish to God that he had killed me, and that I were lying where he lies, among that quiet company by the lagune.”

They were alone together, Lisa having slipped away, taking the boy with her, when she found the revelation inevitable. Let them fight it out, these two; and if this Englishwoman loved her dead brother better than her living husband, and chose to desert that noble husband, and thus show of what poor stuff she was made, there was Lisa who adored him, who would follow him through the world, if he would let her, with fidelity that neither time nor trouble could change.

Eve stood for a few moments mutely looking at the blurred photograph, the wretched production of an itinerant photographer’s camera, in which one hand was out of focus, jointless, fingerless, monstrous. Poor as the image was, it brought back the days of her childhood as vividly as if it had been the finest work of art that Venice, in her golden age of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese, could have produced. How well she remembered him! How dearly she had loved him! His holidays had been a season of boisterous gladness, his return to school or university a time of mourning. He had given interest and delight to all her childish amusements. He had taught her to ride. He had taught her to shoot with an air-gun, which was one of his choicest possessions. He had taught her to serve at tennis, to play billiards on the worn-out table, where the balls rattled against the cushions as on cast iron. He had done all these things in a casual way, never sacrificing any inclination or engagement of his own to her pleasure—but in after days, when he had vanished out of her life, she knew not whither, it seemed to her that he had been the kindest and most unselfish of brothers. And he was dead, had been dead for years, cut off in the prime of his manhood by a remorseless hand. He was dead, and the man who had slain him stood before her, undaunted, impenitent—her husband.