“He will be handsome, he will be big,” said the ’cello, “and already at five years old he shows me that he has an ear as true as a bird’s, or as yours. You will send him to the Conservatorio at Milan as soon as he is old enough to enter, and he will find his fortune in his larynx as you have.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
“A SCENE OF LIGHT AND GLORY.”
It was April, the third springtime after the parting of the wedded lovers, and to Eve it seemed as if many years had come and gone since she looked upon her husband’s face. She had endured her life somehow, a life of mornings and afternoons, of twilight and sunrise, of moons that waxed and waned, of seasons that changed from hot to cold and back again, an existence like a squirrel’s wheel, and having nothing in common with that happy wedded life in which her eyes opened every morning upon joy and love—the joy of knowing the beloved companion near, the love which seemed ever near and ever growing.
Hetty had been a comfort to her in all that time, and had shown herself so sympathetic that Eve had resolved never to part with her, except to a husband; and, as yet, among Hetty’s numerous admirers there had been no one whom she cared for as a future husband. So far Hetty was heart-whole and devoted to her sister, more than ever devoted, alas! now, when the red flag of phthisis flaunted upon Eve’s hollow cheeks, and too surely marked the beginning of the end.
She had borne up bravely in those years of exile, making the best of life in some of earth’s pleasantest places, courting cheerfulness for her young sister’s sake, and never wearing her widowed heart upon her sleeve. She had borne up bravely, though the enemy had been at work all the time, and the fatal strain which had developed so early in Peggy, showed itself in Eve by occasional illnesses, through which she battled successfully, with the aid of much careful nursing by the skilled Benson and the devoted Hetty. They had patched her up time after time, as Benson told her compatriots in the courier’s room at the hotel, but the day was coming when patching would no longer serve—when the frail frame and the brave spirit must yield to the inevitable.
“Well, it’ll have to come to all of us, in our time,” said Benson, brushing away a tear or two, “but it seems hard it should come to her before she’s six and twenty. So pretty, too, and such a sweet disposition. It’ll be a long time before I shall get a mistress I shall like as well, though when I first took the place I thought I should find it strange like, after being used only to titled people. But there, we’re all human, and there ain’t much difference between a plain country gentleman’s wife and a duchess when you’re putting a poultice on her chest.”
In the bright April weather Eve and her sister came to Venice, the city to which all Eve’s thoughts had been trending ever since she left England, nearly three years before. She had always meant to go there, always wished to look upon the scene of her brother’s untimely death, and to kneel beside his nameless grave; but she had shrunk with an indescribable dread from the accomplishment of her desire, her heart aching even at the thought of the pain it must cost her to look upon that place, which was associated with all her misery.
Hetty had talked about Venice very often, in her ignorance of all painful associations, and Eve had put her off with promises. “Yes, dear, I mean to go there, sooner or later;” and Hetty hung over the coloured plan in Baedeker—the blue canal, with its curious serpentine curve—and longed to be there with all the intensity which pertains to the juvenile side of twenty. Venice, a name to conjure with! She repeated those lines of Rogers’, the plain unvarnished statement—“There is a glorious city by the sea; the sea is in the broad, the narrow streets”—which brings that wonder-city before the eye of the mind more vividly than all the fire and fervour of Byron, or the word-painting of Dickens and Howells.