“The grave is the last in the avenue leading due west by the side of the south wall in the cemetery at San Michele. There is a wooden cross, and the name Smith. The grave was bought and the cross erected at the expense of the Venetian girl.”
Eve’s gondola took her to the sea-girt burial-place in the morning sunshine. She carried a basket of roses and narcissus, to lay upon her brother’s grave, and her mind was full of the hour when she saw him for the last time. How near in its distinctness of detail, of sensation even! how far in that sense of remoteness which made her feel as if she were looking across a gulf of death and time to another life! Was that really herself—that impetuous girl, whose arms had clung round her brother’s neck in the agony of parting, and who had never known any other love?
To-day there was a conflict of feeling. There was the thought of the man whose crime had been the crime of a moment, whose punishment was the punishment of a lifetime.
“I know that he loved me,” she told herself. “I know that I was necessary to his happiness, and yet I sent him away from me. Could I do otherwise? No. The man who killed my brother could not be my husband, I knowing what he had done. Ah, as long as I did not know, what a happy woman I was! And I might have lived happy in my ignorance to the end but for my own fault.”
And then with bitterest smile she said aloud—
“Ah, Fatima, Fatima, how dearly you have paid for the turning of the key!”
She found San Michele, the quiet island of the dead, sleeping in the soft haze of morning on the bosom of the lagune. A little way off, the chimneys of Murano were tarnishing the clear Italian sky with their smoke; the barges were loading and unloading; the glass-makers were passing to and fro—women and girls flip-flopping over the damp stones in their quarter-less shoes! the children and the beggars were sprawling in the sun. There the stir and variety of life: here the silence and the sameness of death.
She found her brother’s grave, and the monument which Fiordelisa and her aunt had set up in his honour. The grave was a mound on which the grass grew tall and rank, as it grows at Torcello, above the ruins of the mother city. The monument—poor tribute of faithful poverty—was a wooden cross painted black, with an inscription in white lettering, rudely done:—
SIR SMIZZ
MORTO A VENEZIA,
MARTEDI-GRASSO, 1885.
Below this brief description were seven of those conventional figures—in shape like a chandelier-drop—which often ornament the funeral drapery that marks the house of death. These chandelier-drops, painted white on the black ground of the cross, represented tears. They were seven, the mystic number, sacred to every Catholic mind.