“Oh, dearest, it was time you sent for me; it was time,” he said. “You have given me a long penance. Nothing but Africa could have helped me to bear my life. In a world less full of strange hazards I must have lost patience with calamity, and made a swift and sudden end of myself. Thanks to the Dark Continent I have lived somehow, as you see, and come back a semi-savage, a creature of thews and sinews.”
“No, you are only rougher looking and browner. I can see the soul shining through your eyes. Africa has not altered that.”
“But you, dear love,” he said, with a thrill in his voice that marked the strangled sob, “you are altered. You are looking tired and ill. I am afraid you have been neglecting yourself. I shall take you to the Engadine, where we ought to have taken poor Peggy. The Riviera was a mistake. A winter at St. Moritz would have cured her. We will start to-morrow.”
She did not answer for a minute or so, but nestled nearer to him, with her wan cheek leaning against his shoulder, and her waxen fingers clasping his strong wrist, hardened and roughened by weather and toil.
“The Engadine can do nothing for me, Jack—no more than it could have done for Peggy. South or north, mountain or valley, the end would have been the same. It is our family history, Jack. We were doomed from our birth. I was sent to the Engadine last winter, and Hetty and I only left St. Moritz in March. We stayed at Varese for nearly a month, and then came here. Hetty is with me, so bright, so active, so happy; but some day perhaps she will look in the glass as I have looked, and will see the summons written on her face. Dear husband, don’t be too sorry for me. This parting must have come, even if we had escaped the other; even if I had never known what happened at Florian’s; never knelt beside my brother’s grave in the island cemetery. Let me lie near him, Jack: and whatever your future life may be—and God grant it may be rich in blessings, you have suffered enough for your sin—think of me sometimes; and sometimes, in your wanderings, go to San Michele and look upon my grave.”
He clasped her close against his heart, with a shuddering sigh.
Two days after, he took her away from the life and movement of the Riva to a palace on the Grand Canal, where the quiet of the Silent City had a soothing influence on her overwrought spirit. If any life could have been happy in which the end was so near, theirs would have been happy in that delicious beginning of the Venetian summer, a season when mere existence is a privilege. Whatever love which passeth understanding can do to smooth the last days of a fading life was done for Eve; and it may be that the footsteps of the invincible Enemy were slackened somewhat by that unsleeping watchfulness.
The end came slowly, and not ungently, and till the end her husband was her devoted nurse and companion, thinking no thought that was not of her.
THE END.