April 18. Venice.—A morning of adventures and emotions which leave me sick and weary, and yet unable to sleep, though I have lain down on the sofa of my room for more than an hour in the attempt. I therefore make up my diary to date in a hurried fashion, for the sake of the riddance it affords to ideas which otherwise remain suspended hotly in the brain.
We arrived here this morning in broad sunlight, which lit up the sea-girt buildings as we approached so that they seemed like a city of floating raft-like on the smooth, blue deep. But I only glanced from the carriage window at the lovely scene, and we were soon across the intervening water and inside the railway station. When we got to the front steps the row of black and the shouts of the gondoliers so bewildered my father that he was understood to require two gondolas instead of one with two , and so I found him in one and myself in another. We got this righted after a while, and were rowed at once to the hotel on the Riva degli Schiavoni where M. de la Feste had been staying when we last heard from him, the way being down the Grand Canal for some distance, under the Rialto, and then by narrow canals which eventually brought us under the Bridge of Sighs—harmonious to our moods!—and out again into open water. The scene was purity itself as to colour, but it was cruel that I should it for the first time under such circumstances.
As soon as I entered the hotel, which is an old-fashioned place, like most places here, where people are taken en pension as well as the ordinary way, I rushed to the framed list of visitors hanging in the hall, and in a moment I saw Charles’s name upon it among the rest. But she was our chief thought. I turned to the hall porter, and—knowing that she would have travelled as ‘Madame de la Feste’—I asked for her under that name, without my father hearing. (He, poor soul, was making confused outside the door about ‘an English lady,’ as if there were not a score of English ladies at hand.)
‘She has just come,’ said the porter. ‘Madame came by the very early train this morning, when Monsieur was asleep, and she requested us not to disturb him. She is now in her room.’
Whether Caroline had seen us from the window, or overheard me, I do not know, but at that moment I heard footsteps on the bare marble stairs, and she appeared in person .
‘Caroline!’ I exclaimed, ‘why have you done this?’ and rushed up to her.
She did not answer; but looked down to hide her emotion, which she conquered after the of a few seconds, putting on a practical tone that her.
‘I am just going to my husband,’ she said. ‘I have not yet seen him. I have not been here long.’ She to give no further reason for her movements, and made as if to move on. I her to come into a private room where I could speak to her in confidence, but she objected. However, the dining-room, close at hand, was quite empty at this hour, and I got her inside and closed the door. I do not know how I began my explanation, or how I ended it, but I told her and brokenly enough that the marriage was not real.
‘Not real?’ she said vacantly.
‘It is not,’ said I. ‘You will find that it is all as I say.’
She could not believe my meaning even then. ‘Not his wife?’ she cried. ‘It is impossible. What am I, then?’
I added more details, and the reason for my conduct as well as I could; but Heaven knows how very difficult I found it to feel a more for it in my own mind than she did in hers.
The revulsion of feeling, as soon as she really comprehended all, was most . After her grief had in some measure spent itself she turned against both him and me.
‘Why should have I been deceived like this?’ she demanded, with a bitter of which I had not deemed such a creature capable. ‘Do you suppose that anything could such an imposition? What, O what a you have spread for me!’
I murmured, ‘Your life seemed to require it,’ but she did not hear me. She sank down in a chair, covered her face, and then my father came in. ‘O, here you are!’ he said. ‘I could not find you. And Caroline!’
‘And were you, papa, a party to this strange deed of kindness?’
‘To what?’ said he.
Then out it all came, and for the first time he was made acquainted with the fact that the scheme for her illness, which I had sounded him upon, had been really carried out. In a moment he sided with Caroline. My repeated assurance that my was good availed less than nothing. In a minute or two Caroline arose and went out of the room, and my father followed her, leaving me alone to my reflections.
I was so upon finding Charles immediately that I did not notice whither they went. The servants told me that M. de la Feste was just outside smoking, and one of them went to look for him, I following; but before we had gone many steps he came out of the hotel behind me. I expected him to be amazed; but he showed no surprise at seeing me, though he showed another kind of feeling to an extent which dismayed me. I may have revealed something similar; but I struggled hard against all emotion, and as soon as I could I told him she had come. He simply said ‘Yes’ in a low voice.
‘You know it, Charles?’ said I.
‘I have just learnt it,’ he said.
‘O, Charles,’ I went on, ‘having delayed completing your marriage with her till now, I fear—it has become a serious position for us. Why did you not reply to our letters?’
‘I was purposing to reply in person: I did not know how to address her on the point—how to address you. But what has become of her?’
‘She has gone off with my father,’ said I; ‘indignant with you, and scorning me.’
He was silent: and I suggested that we should follow them, pointing out the direction which I fancied their had taken. As the one we got into was doubly manned we soon came in view of their two figures ahead of us, while they were not likely to observe us, our boat having the ‘felze’ on, while theirs was uncovered. They shot into a narrow canal just beyond the Giardino Reale, and by the time we were floating up between its slimy walls we saw them getting out of their gondola at the steps which lead up near the end of the Via 22 Marzo. When we reached the same spot they were walking up and down the Via in . Getting out he stood on the lower steps watching them. I watched him. He seemed to fall into a reverie.
‘Will you not go and speak to her?’ said I at length.
He
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