“Are these your African manners?” she gasped, laughing and crying in the same moment.
“Oh, my love, my love, how sweet to hold you on my heart again and be forgiven! I am forgiven, am I not, dear? My calamity, or my crime—call it what you will—is forgiven. Oh, love, I have suffered. I have drunk the cup of atonement.”
She was sobbing upon his shoulder, her face hidden, as she clung to him, with wasted arms wreathing his neck. In the blindness of his joy—for joy, like fortune, is stone blind—he had not noticed how pitiably thin those caressing arms had grown. Suddenly, scared by her silence, he withdrew himself from that caress, and held her from him at arm’s length, and, looking into her face, saw the sign manual of death, and knew why she had summoned him.
By a heroic effort he commanded his countenance, and smiled faintly back her own faint smile.
“There is no question of the past between you and me,” she said, “only love, a world of love.”
He drew her to his breast again, cradling the thin cheek against his brown and bearded countenance, holding her to him as if he would hold her there against the grim assailant Death, breathing his own strong life into her as their lips met and their breath mingled. Surely between them there was life and vigour enough to ward off Death.
“My darling, my darling, my darling!”
It was all that he could say just yet. The rapture of reunion, the agony of an unspeakable dread were storming heart and mind. He felt like a man lashed to the mast in a hurricane, all the forces of Nature warring round him, unable to measure his danger or his chance of rescue.
To have her, to hold her again, loving him as of old. And then to lose her! But must he lose her? Could neither love nor science work a miracle, and snatch her from the jaws of the Destroyer?
He grew calmer presently, and they sat side by side in the deepening shadows, and began to talk to each other quietly, in soft hushed voices, while the music and the voices of the Riva mixed with their half-whispered sentences, and the footsteps went by with a gay spring in them as if all Venice were hurrying from pleasure to pleasure.