The Venetians

by M. E. Braddon

Nearly three years had passed, and he knew no more about the man he stabbed than he had known when the dagger dropped from his hand warm with the stranger’s life-blood. The most watchful attention to the newspapers had resulted in no further knowledge. There had been an occasional paragraph about the fatal brawl in Venice. He was thankful to observe that no one had written of his crime as murder. The fact that the dagger had been bought within an hour of its fatal use—the accidental nature of the encounter—and the brutality of the unknown’s attack had been discussed at length, and there had been a good deal of speculation as to his own character and social status. Had the event happened a few years later some keen-witted special correspondent would doubtless have contrived to interview Fiordelisa; and the girl’s artless prattle and her Venetian environment would have furnished material for a spirited article.

The interest in the death of a nameless Englishman soon died out, and the newspapers found no more to say about the fatal brawl in the Piazza, and as the years went by Vansittart told himself that this dark chapter in his life was closed for ever, that the mother who loved him would never know that his conscience was burdened with the death of a fellow-creature.

Looking backward he remembered an occasion in his boyhood when a sudden impulse of fury had brought disgrace upon him, and had caused his mother much distress of mind. It was at a time when he was reading hard at home with a private tutor, shortly before he went to Oxford. A groom had ill-used one of his horses, or Vansittart believed he had, and the young man had attacked and belaboured him severely. The lad had been able to defend himself, and the two had been fairly matched as to weight and size, but Vansittart had all the science on his side, and he felt afterwards that he had disgraced himself by the encounter. His mother’s distress grieved him deeply; and he went so far as to apologize to the vanquished hireling, which apology raised him to the pinnacle of honour in the opinion of the stable generally.

“There’s plenty of young masters as would chuck a sovereign to a lad he’d whacked, but it’s only a thoroughbred one that would say, ‘I beg your pardon, Bates; I ought to have known better,’” said the old family coachman, who had driven Master Jack to be christened.

The burden upon his conscience was an old burden by this time, and he was able to carry his load so that no one suspected evil under that pleasant, open-hearted aspect of a man who fulfilled all the social duties. He was a good son, a kind and affectionate brother, a generous landlord and master. As the world saw his life there was no flaw in it. He had troops of friends, an honourable status, plenty of money, everything that this world can give of good, in that moderate measure which the poet-philosopher has taught us to esteem as life’s best.

“I suppose the sword is hanging by a hair somewhere, and will drop when I least expect it,” he said to himself, in the hour of dark memories.

A chance allusion—some loving word of praise from his mother, the turn of a conversation, the plot of a play or a novel—would sometimes stir the dark waters of memory; but he did his best to forget, since there was nothing that he could do to atone; and he tried to convince himself that it was all the better for humanity at large that there was one reprobate less in the world.

This had been his temper for the last year or so, as memory lost something of its vivid colouring; and he had come to take that act of his in Venice as part and parcel of his life and character.

He bore himself gaily enough in this Christmas holiday at Redwold Towers, and Lady Hartley declared that he was the life and soul of her house-party.

“You have not such a passion for field-sports as the rest of the men,” she said. “One may hope to be favoured with your society for an occasional hour between breakfast and dinner, while those other wretches troop off in their horrid thick boots before I come downstairs in the morning, and I hear no more of them till dinner, unless I go with the luncheon cart.”