XIX

“Mother, it is done⁠—Juliet will be happy. Oh, that I could lie down to rest beside you now!”

These were the words with which Ida laid her bridal flowers on her mother’s grave.

Then bowing her head on a corner of the marble monument, her tears fell thick and fast upon the white slab on which it rested.

The sacrifice she had planned was finished; her nerves had been as steel and her heart as stone till her self-imposed obligation had been fulfilled to its uttermost letter. Now the inevitable reaction was setting in, and she was beginning to count the cost of what she had done.

And the cost, when counted, could be summed up in a sentence⁠—the happiness of her life to its very last hour.

The renunciation of Clive and his love had been bitter enough; but even that to her fancy now counted as nothing beside the terrible bondage into which she had voluntarily entered by becoming the wife of a man for whom she had neither liking nor respect.

When she had played the part of a scornful, cold-hearted maiden, and had sent Clive from her side to pay court to Juliet, and also, later on, when, in order to put Juliet’s happiness beyond a doubt, she had consented to marry Sefton, she had said to herself:

“What does anything in life matter, so long as those two are happy!”

Now, however, as she faced the fact that nothing but death could release her from the fealty which she had just vowed to a man whom she thoroughly despised, her heart failed her, and she stood appalled at the thought of the dreary years that stretched before her⁠—a “life of night with never a hope of dawn.”

It was no wonder, with thoughts such as these, that her tears should fall thick and fast; nor that she should moan to the mother who had been laid to rest so long ago: “Would that I were lying beside you now!”

The sunshine gleamed whitely on the many tombstones. A light breeze, fresh with the salt of the sea, fanned the hillside, and ruffled the long grasses amid which she stood. A lark rose from the turf, and went soaring upwards into the “living blue,” high and higher, till it became literally a “sightless song.” A woman rose slowly from a gravestone on which she was seated a few yards distant, and, with a slow, hesitating tread, drew near the sorrowing girl.

Ida had been so absorbed in her own sad thoughts as she had made her way towards her mother’s grave, that she had not noticed a group of three persons seated among the tombstones, who had started, and then exchanged glances one with the other at her approach.

A picturesque group these three made among the white tombstones and tall, flowering grasses. The woman, who was about forty-five years of age, was dark-skinned and handsome, with the beauty of South Italy; she was dressed in a pretty peasant’s costume⁠—a dark-blue skirt with broad orange border, and wore on her head a white panni-cloth. Beside her, lounging on the grass, was a fine-featured, insolent-looking young man, with gay necktie, and slouch hat tilted over his eyes to keep out the dazzling sunshine. A little in the rear of these two, a black-eyed, olive-skinned boy stood resting his barrel-organ against some iron railings that enclosed a monument, and on his organ was perched a monkey, gravely munching a green apple.

These three persons were Francesca Xardez, Giorno her eldest son, and Pippo her youngest.

Pippo had leaned forward, touched his mother’s shoulder, and whispered in her ear as Ida approached, and passed within a few yards of them. Upon which Francesca had started, and exclaimed, “O gran cielo! Non è possibile!” and then she had risen to her feet, and with slow, hesitating steps, had made her way towards the young lady.

Ida did not turn her head until she heard a deep voice saying, at her elbow, in Italian:

“This is fate! Signora, can you understand me?”

Ida understood her easily enough. Her recent frequent visits to Italy to study art had familiarised her with the Italian language.

She naturally enough concluded that the woman was begging, and, wishing to keep her own sad solitude unbroken, took out her purse at once, and offered her some money.

Francesca shook her head.

“Not that from you!” she exclaimed. “It is not possible. I saw you married this morning to a man who⁠—” she broke off abruptly, then again asked the question: “Signora, do you understand me?”

Ida was startled, her curiosity was excited to a painful degree.

“A man who⁠—what?” she asked, continuing the conversation in Italian. “Yes, I understand you easily⁠—finish what you were going to say.”

Francesca looked at her steadily.

“Yes, it is fate,” she said, in the same slow, deep tones as before. “I saw you this morning in your beautiful white dress, and I said to myself, ‘I see her once now, and I see her no more again forever,’ and lo, Fate sends me here to rest among the graves, and then sends you here with your beautiful flowers, and we meet!”

Ida grew impatient.

“If you have anything to say to me you must say it quickly,” she said, “for I cannot spare you many minutes.”

“And when you have heard what I have to tell, you will say, ‘would that Heaven had smitten my ears with deafness before they had listened to such a tale.’ ”

Ida grew white.

“What is it tell me quickly,” she said; “is it anything about⁠—Captain Culvers?”

The words “my husband” would not come to her lips.

Francesca’s swarthy face flushed with anger at the mention of the name. “Signora,” she said, in low but vehement tones, “if that man had his due it would be a stiletto into his heart. Ah, I would that I had dealt him his deathblow, instead of bringing him back to life to play the lover and the traitor.” She spoke in such hurried, passionate tones, that it was with difficulty that Ida caught her meaning.

“You must speak slowly and quietly if you want me to understand you,” she said, feeling that behind all this passion and vehemence there no doubt lay something which it behoved her to know.

Then Francesca, controlling herself with difficulty, told the story of Sefton Culvers’s visit to Calabria.

It was carried beyond the point at which Sefton had left it in his narrative to Lord Culvers and Clive, and told of events that had occurred after his departure from Alta Lauria.

First in order had ensued the death of the Marchese. This had happened within a month after Sefton had left the place, and had overwhelmed Violante with grief; a grief that had increased upon her to the detriment of her health as the weeks passed by and there came no tidings of her absent lover. Sefton had been very cautious in giving information to Violante and her father respecting himself and his family, and the only address he had left with her was at an hotel in London where he occasionally stayed. To that hotel again and again Violante addressed imploring letters, to which, as a matter of course, there came no reply.

At first the girl had found it impossible to realise that the man in whom she had so implicitly trusted had proved false, and that deliberate insult was intended to one of her name and race. She insisted on believing that some accident had befallen him, and announced her intention of setting off for England to ascertain if such were the case. Illness prevented her putting her intention into execution; malarial fever, always prone to attack the weak and ailing, seized her, and for some time her life was despaired of. Even after the fever had run its course and she had been pronounced convalescent, it did not need a skilled eye to see that her constitution had been seriously undermined. A great lassitude took possession of her; she ate next to nothing, living entirely on granita and fruit; took no exercise, and showed no interest whatever in the people and things around her. Then it was that Francesca had thought that the time to act had come. She had been the one who had brought the man back to life to act the part of lover and traitor, she would be the one to hunt him down, find out the truth about him, and⁠—Here Francesca broke off abruptly, furtively glancing into Ida’s eyes, which, during the whole of the story, had not once been lifted from her face.

She resumed her narrative at another point, telling of the difficulty with which they had got together sufficient money for the journey. How that Violante had given her every penny she had in the world in order to buy Pippo an organ, with which it was hoped the scanty purse might be eked out, and how that Giorno’s passage to Inghilterra had been clubbed together for by his fellow vinedressers, who one and all would willingly have laid down their lives to give their darling young lady the desire of her heart.

Francesca had a relative in London who was an ice and sweetmeat seller. To his house the three made their way first on their arrival in England, and, thanks to his good offices and the use of an Army List and a Burke’s Peerage, they succeeded in coming upon the traces of Captain Culvers. At least, so far as to ascertain that he had resigned his commission in the Army, and that he had near relatives who owned to a country house at Dering and a town house in Belgrave Square.

Then it was that Pippo and his organ had become useful. The little fellow, with his handsome face and merry ways, managed to win favour with the servants of Lord Culvers’s town household, and found out through them that Captain Culvers would shortly be married at Hastings to his cousin.

After ascertaining full particulars of this wedding, the three had started for Hastings. They did not, however, succeed in reaching the church until the service had begun and the doors were closed. So they had stood in the porch waiting till the ceremony was over, and there had seen the bride pass out of the church and down the steps to her carriage.

Then they had wandered away among the tombs at the back of the church, there to eat their frugal meal of bread and cheese. And to hold council with each other, too, it seemed, for, until Ida’s unexpected appearance, they had been absorbed in earnest, low-voiced talk, in which Giorno’s deep bass voice seemed to take a leading part.

“We will not lose sight of him. If she dies let him look out⁠—that’s all,” Giorno was saying at the moment that Pippo touched his mother’s shoulder and warned her of Ida’s approach.

“His bride,” thought the woman. “Shall they love, shall they be happy? Ah, I will plant the seeds of strife between them, and, please the saints, they will grow!” And then she had crossed the churchyard and had accosted the young lady.

Ida had listened to the tale, saying never a word, her face growing white and whiter, her features seeming to harden as if they were being turned into stone.

Then a great wave of indignation swept over her.

This the man whom she had vowed to love and honour, to cleave to till death parted them! Impossible! If there were no other way, death should part them at once.

But there was another way. It did not for a moment occur to her to go back to her father and insist on a separation from her newly-made husband.

No, she could not see her father arranging such a separation, although easily enough she could picture him endeavouring to patch up a peace between Sefton and herself, and doing his utmost to induce them to live together as husband and wife.

Her hope of deliverance seemed to lie in another quarter. She would go at once straight to Alta Lauria to the discarded Violante, and ask her to receive as her guest one who was more unhappy in her wifehood than was the girl in her slighted maidenhood. To Violante’s presence she would summon her father to hear the girl’s story from her own lips. And Sefton likewise should be summoned, and there, face to face with the two women he had wronged, he should be made to sign a deed of separation that would guarantee to his wife her freedom to the last hour of her life.

The mere thought of her possible release from bondage set the blood dancing in her veins, and brought back the colour to her cheek.

Francesca heard, with unconcealed amazement, of the young lady’s resolve. For a moment she said nothing. Then, pointing to Giorno, still lying on the grass with his hat tilted over his eyes, she said that she must go and consult her son as to whether the thing were possible.

There had followed a short whispered colloquy between the two, at the end of which Francesca had come back, saying respectfully that if the young lady would trust herself to her guidance, she would conduct her safely to Alta Lauria.

Then had succeeded a necessary arrangement of plans. Pippo was despatched to see if Captain Culvers were still patiently awaiting his bride in the street below, and Ida and Francesca, leaving the churchyard by its back entrance, had made their way along by-streets to the church of “Saint Mary, Star of the Sea,” whither Pippo had directions to follow them.

It was in the church of “Saint Mary, Star of the Sea,” that Ida, tearing a leaf from her notebook, had written the hurried line to her father which Pippo had carried to Glynde Lodge.

There, too, they had arranged the successive steps of their journey. Ida would travel alone to London, leaving by a train from Hastings station, not Saint Leonard’s, where her maid was awaiting her. An excursion train, Francesca said, left in an hour or so, and in the crowd and hurry that usually attends the departure of such a train, it was not likely that the quietly-dressed young lady would attract attention.

Once in London, with a thick veil, a long cloak, and⁠—necessary item!⁠—a full purse, no difficulties in the way of a journey to South Italy had need to be anticipated.