“If I loved him? Why, my whole being is made up of love for him.”
“What then? And you send him from you for an accident—for something which no one could help. I was there—these eyes saw it. A moment and it was done! There was not time for thought. For that one instant of wrong-doing are you to make his life miserable?”
“He killed my brother. Do you understand that, Lisa? The man who ought to have been your husband was my brother. Did you care nothing for him—you, the mother of his child?”
“Si, si, I cared for him. When first he came to Burano I worshipped him as if he had been St. Mark. And when he said, ‘Come to Venice with me, Lisa, and be my little wife,’ I went. It was wicked, I know. I ought not to have left Burano till I had been to confession, and the priest had married us; but when I said, ‘You will marry me, Signor Inglese,’ he said, ‘Yes, Lisa, by-and-by,’ and that was what he always said till the last—‘by-and-by.’ He was not always kind to me, Si’ora, though he was your brother. He beat me sometimes when the luck had been bad at cards. When he had been sitting up half the night playing cards with his friends, and I crept into the room and begged him to play no more—he was not kind then. He would start up out of his chair, and swear a big English oath, and strike at me with his clenched fist. But am I sorry? Yes, of course I am sorry. It was dreadful to see him fall dead in a moment; but is that to be remembered against your husband years afterwards? He was brutal that night, so brutal that he deserved his death, almost. He flew at the strange Englishman like a tiger. He would not listen, he would not believe that I was not false to him. He was mad with drink and foolish anger. He was like a wild beast. And for an accident like that you would make the noblest of men unhappy. Ah, Si’ora, that is not love. If your husband belonged to me, and he loved me as he loves you, he might kill twenty men, and I would cling to him and love him still. What would their life be to me, or their death, if I had him?”
“You are a semi-civilized savage, and you can’t understand,” said Eve, sternly. “Life and death, good name, and honour, have no meaning for you.”
“Love means more than all,” said Lisa, doggedly.
“There is only one man you have the right to love,” said Eve; “the man who ought to have been your husband. You must be indeed a wretch if you can love the man who killed him.”
“Ah, madonna mia, we do not make our hearts. They are made for us,” Lisa pleaded naively. “The Signor Inglese was very good to me at Burano in my poverty; but afterwards, at Venice, I had a good deal to suffer. It was a hard life sometimes. One had need be young, and able to laugh, and forgive and forget. But he—Signor Vansittart—he was always kind. His face haunted me after that Shrove Tuesday on the Lido, and when we met again—when la Zia and I were strangers in London, without a friend in the world—oh, how kind and generous he was! All that I have of fame and fortune I owe to him, and though he does not care for me so much as that,” with a contemptuous wave of her fingers, “yet he is always gentle, always good. Do not tell me that I am to care more for the dead man who deceived me and beat me than for the living man who has been my benefactor, my guardian angel, and for whom I say a paternoster and two aves every night of my life. It is sweet to say these for his sake: that his sin may be forgiven.”
“Ah, you do not understand. You do not know what death is,” said Eve, with gloomy anger, getting up from the sofa, and rearranging her loosened hair with trembling hands.
“It must come to all of us,” answered Lisa, with a philosophical shrug. “Better that it should come in a moment as his came, without suffering, without fear, than that we should live to be old and fat and full of maladies. People die of dreadful diseases that one shudders only to hear of, and that is called a natural death. How much better to be stabbed to the heart unawares.”