“Every day? No, Signora. But in Carnival time one is prepared for strange things happening. I begin to recall the circumstance, but not very clearly. A young Englishman stabbed with a dagger that had been bought over the way a short time before. He had been drinking, and was jealous of a young woman who was present. He attacked his compatriot with savage violence. Yes, I recall the affair more clearly now. There were those present who said he brought his fate upon himself by his brutality. The man who stabbed him made a bolt of it, on a hint from a bystander—ran across the Piazzetta, jumped into the water, and swam for his life. No one in Venice ever knew what became of him. He must have been picked up by a gondola, and must have got away by the railroad. Who knows? He may have got ashore on the mainland, and made his way to Mestre, so as to avoid the railway station here, where the police might be on the watch for him. Anyhow, he got away. He had courage, quickness, his wits well about him.”
“It was at Florian’s that this happened?” asked Eve.
“Yes, at Florian’s—where else? There is no caffè in Venice equal to Florian’s.”
That was all. She paid for her photographs and went back to Florian’s, and peered in at the bright, pretty salons, where the Italians were lounging over their coffee, with here and there a group playing dominoes, and where tourists—English, American, German—were enjoying themselves more noisily. She wondered in which of those salons the tragedy had been acted. Was the stain of her brother’s blood on the floor ineffaceable, like Rizzio’s in the fatal room at Holyrood? She loitered for a few minutes, looking in through the open doors and windows shudderingly; and seeing she was observed, she moved quickly away, and presently was being followed across the piazza by a Venetian seeker of bonnes fortunes, she herself happily unconscious of the fact.
She looked at the shops in the Procuratie Vecchie, and was pestered by the touting shopkeepers after their Venetian manner. She looked in at all those Eastern toys and Italian gewgaws, and jewellery which has here and there a suggestion of Birmingham.
“Do you sell daggers?” she asked a black-eyed youth, who had entreated her earnestly to ascend to the show-room above, assuring her that the “to look costs nothing.”
Her question startled him. “Daggers, yes, assuredly. Was it a jewelled dagger for her hair that the Signora desired? He had of the most magnificent.”
No. She wanted no dagger, only to know whether he sold them, real daggers, strong enough to wound fatally.
He showed her a whole armoury of Moorish knives, any one of which looked as if it might be deadly.
“Do you remember a young Englishman being killed with such a dagger as this?” she said, pointing to one of the deadliest, “by accident, in Carnival time?”