CHAPTER X.
“AS THINGS THAT ARE NOT SHALL THESE THINGS BE.”
Before two o’clock next day Vansittart had been up and down more stairs than he ever remembered to have mounted and descended in a single day. He had inspected flats in the neighbourhood of the Strand, and flats at Millbank, and flats at Chelsea; and finally, after much driving to and fro in a hansom, and interviews with several house-agents, he had discovered a third floor in a newly erected house near Cheyne Walk which seemed to him the ideal home for Fiordelisa and her aunt. The house stood at a corner, and thewindows and balcony of this upper story commanded a fine view of the river and Battersea Park; while to the eastward appeared the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and southward rose the Kentish hills and the Crystal Palace. The flat contained three good rooms, with a tiny kitchen at the back. The balcony was architectural, and looked solid and secure. There was a fascinating oriel window at the corner of the principal room, which projected so as to command the west. Nothing could have been brighter or more airy, and the agent who took Vansittart over the rooms assured him that the house was substantially built, and altogether satisfactory. No doubt most agents would say as much about most houses, but the appearance of this house, the thickness of the walls, and the solidity of the woodwork went far to justify the agent’s praises.
The rent was eighty-five pounds a year, all told; and this was a rent which came well within the amount that Vansittart was prepared to pay. He was thoroughly in earnest in his desire to be of substantial service to Lisa and her aunt. He was not a rich man; but he told himself that he could spare two hundred a year for the solace of his conscience; and he was prepared to impoverish himself to that amount for the rest of his life. Yes, even in that dim future when he should have sons at the University and daughters to marry, and when hundreds would be of much more consequence to him than they were now. Two hundred a year would he forfeit for his sin; and he contemplated the sacrifice with so much the more satisfaction because of his cordial liking for the impulsive peasant girl whose fate had become interwoven with his own.
He found aunt and niece at home, and expectant of his arrival. He had exchanged his hansom for a brougham from a livery stable, which would accommodate three people.
“I am going to take you to see the home I have chosen for you, Lisa,” he said; “that is to say, if you would rather make your home in London than in Italy.”
“Yes, yes; ever so much rather,” she answered eagerly. “London is a grand city. You live in London, don’t you?”
“Not always. I am seldom here more than a month or two at a time. I am not a lover of cities.”
She looked disappointed at this reply.
“You will come and see us sometimes, when you are in London?” she asked.
“Certainly. I shall look in upon you now and then to see how you and la Zia are getting on in your new surroundings. And now let us go and look at the apartments I have chosen. Perhaps you will not like my choice.”
La Zia protested that this was out of the question. His choicemust be perfection. It was not possible for so noble a gentleman to err in taste or judgment.
Fiordelisa was dressed for going out. She was poorly clad in her well-worn black gown and a little cheap black net bonnet, with pale pink roses in it, but her dress was neater than usual. La Zia had also dressed herself tidily, and looked more reputable than he would have thought possible, remembering the flaunting ruby plush and coppery gold chain in Venice. The little boy had been committed to the care of the landlady, who was prodigiously fond of him, Lisa told Vansittart.
The drive by St. James’s Park, Buckingham Palace, and Eton Square was a delight to the Venetians. They exclaimed at every new feature of the way. The houses, the soldiers, the trees, the palace, and even the long, solemn, unbeautiful square impressed them. The magnitude of everything was so astounding after Venice. The wide expanses and seemingly illimitable distances filled them with wonder. They had been surprised at the extent of Milan; but this London looked as if it could swallow twenty Milans.
The brougham drove along the King’s Road, turned into Oakley Street, and brought them suddenly face to face with the Thames in one of its pleasantest aspects. The sun was shining on the river, the trees were purple with swelling leaf-buds, the old houses of Cheyne Walk looked bright and gay in the sunlight.
“Oh, how pretty!” cried Lisa, and Lisa’s aunt was quite as enthusiastic.
“There is one thing I must ask you,” said Vansittart, “before we come to business with the house-agent. I don’t know the surname of either of you ladies.”
“My name is Vivanti,” said the aunt, “and Lisa’s is the same. She is my brother’s daughter.”
“Then Lisa shall be Madame Vivanti, and you—shall we say Mademoiselle?”
“As you will. I have never been married. The man I loved and was to have married was a fisherman, and his boat was wrecked one stormy night between Venice and Chioggia. I never cared for any one else; so I lived with my brother and his wife, and worked for them and with them. He has a swarm of children, of whom Lisa is the eldest.”
“Then you have a number of brothers and sisters, Lisa,” said Vansittart. “Can you reconcile your mind to living in England and seeing them no more?”
Lisa shrugged her shoulders.
“There are too many of us,” she said; “each of us felt what it was to be one mouth too many. The mother died six years ago, worn out like an old shoe that has tramped over the stones throughall weathers. My father would beat us for a word or a look. It was a hard life at Burano. I don’t want to go back there—ever. And your name, Signor; you have not told us that.”
“My name! Ah, true!”
He hesitated for an instant or so. Could he trust them with the knowledge of his name and surroundings? He thought not. They were women, impulsive, uneducated, therefore uninstructed in the higher law of honour.
“My name is Smith,” he said.
“How strange! The same as his,” exclaimed Lisa.
“It is a common English name.”
The carriage stopped at a street corner, and Vansittart led the way up the brand-new staircase to the brand-new third story. Lisa and her aunt were in raptures. Everything was so pretty, the paint, the paper, the ceilings, the windows and balconies, the fireplaces, with their tasteful wooden mantelpieces, and shining flowery tiles, and artistic little grates, warranted to consume a minimum of coals and give a maximum of heat.
There was a somewhat spacious sitting-room, with five windows, including the oriel in the western corner. Opening out of this were two small bedrooms; and on the other side of the landing there was the doll’s-house kitchen, furnished with many shelves and conveniences for cooking and washing up, a kitchen as ingenious in its arrangements, and almost as small as the steward’s cabin on a Jersey steamer.
“Now, Madame Vivanti,” said Vansittart, when the inspection had been made, addressing Lisa with some ceremony, “if you and your aunt are pleased with these rooms, and if you would like to make your permanent home in London, turning your musical gifts to as much account as you can, I shall be happy to furnish them for you, and to pay the rent always, or at any rate as long as you remain unmarried—and”—in a graver tone, “lead a virtuous and reputable life, making no hasty acquaintances, and keeping yourself to yourself until you know this country well enough to make a wise choice of friends. Would you like me to do this?”
“How can you ask such a question? Ah, you are too good and generous to me. I shall be as happy as a queen—to live in rooms like these, with that lovely view over the river. It will be like living in a palace. But pray don’t call me Madame Vivanti. I feel as if you were angry with me.”
“Foolish child! you know better than that,” he said, smiling at her. “I am full of friendliest feelings towards you and your aunt. But I must not call you by your Christian name. Men and women do not do that in England, unless they are blood relations or affianced lovers. You must be Madame Vivanti in future.”
Lisa pouted and looked distressed, but said nothing. La Zia expressed her heartfelt gratitude, for her niece chiefly, for herself in a lesser degree. The kitchen seemed to impress her most of all. There was a hot plate, on which she could cook a risotto or a stufato, or a dish of macaroni, and all those messes which are savoury to the Italian palate.
“You will keep house for your niece, and take care of her boy”—Vansittart approached this subject with a certain hesitation totally unshared by the boy’s mother—“until he is old enough to go to school. Lisa—Madame Vivanti—will have to work hard at her musical education if she means to rise from the ranks of the chorus. I will look about for a respectable singing-master, who is not too famous to teach on moderate terms, and I will pay him for a course of lessons—to last, say, six months. By that time we shall know what Madame’s voice is made of.”
“Call me Si’ora, if you won’t call me Lisa,” said the young woman, impetuously. “I won’t be called by that formal Frenchified Madame.”
“It shall be Si’ora, then, if that will content you. And now, Si’ora, and la Zia, tell me that you are satisfied with me, and that what I am glad to do for you will be in some sense an atonement for—what I did that night.”
Lisa burst into a flood of tears.
“You are too generous; you do too much,” she cried. “He would never have done so much, not even if he had been rich. He thought anything good enough for us—after, after he began to get tired of us. You are a hundred times better than he was——”
“Lisa, Lisa,” remonstrated the elder woman, “that is a hard thing to say.”
“Oh, I know; I loved him once—passionately, passionately. I prayed the Holy Mother every night and morning to make him keep his word and marry me. He gave me my velvet gown. Yes, I loved him passionately. He gave me lessons on the mandoline, and promised he would have me trained to be a lady. Yes, I loved him. I shall never forget the day he first came into the factory at Burano, and looked at us all as we sat at our work, and began to talk to me in Italian. There are so few Englishmen who can speak a single sentence of Italian, and his voice was so soft and kind, and he asked me questions about my work. But afterwards, when we were in Venice, he was not always kind; not as kind or as gentle as you are.”
She cried a little more after these simple utterances; and then she dried her tears, and la Zia comforted her, and they all three went downstairs and drove to the house-agent’s office, where Vansittart introduced Signora Vivanti, of the Royal Italian Opera,Covent Garden, as a tenant for the third floor of Saltero’s Mansion, he himself, Mr. John Smith, vouching for the respectability of the ladies, and paying a year’s rent in advance with some bank-notes he had ready for the transaction. This handsome payment, and the fact that the flat was unfurnished, reconciled the agent to the vagueness of a referee who only described himself as John Smith, of London.
This done, and the key of the third-floor flat having been handed over to him by the agent, Vansittart put Lisa and her aunt into the carriage and bade them good-bye.
“You will be driven back to Stone Court,” he said, “in plenty of time for your work at the theatre. I will see about furnishing the new rooms to-morrow, and everything ought to be ready for you in a week. You had better give your landlady a week’s notice.”
“She will be sorry to part with Paolo,” said la Zia. “She is as fond of him as if she were his grandmother.”
“You will come to see us in a week?” said Lisa, earnestly, as he shut the carriage door.
“In a week your new home will be ready,” he answered; “I will come or write. Good-bye.”
He waved his hand to the driver, whom he had instructed to take the ladies back to the entrance of Stone Court. The carriage moved off, Lisa looking at him earnestly, with something of a disappointed air, to the last.
“Poor child! Did she think I was going to give them a dinner at a restaurant, as I did that day in Venice?” he asked himself, as he walked towards Piccadilly. “What a curious, impulsive, infantine nature it is; made up of laughter and of tears; taking the ghastliest things lightly, and yet with the capacity for passion and grief. Well, it is a good thing, it is a happy thing for me to be able to mend the broken life, and to give happiness where I had brought misery.”
He devoted the best part of the following day to the business of furnishing. It was his first experience in that line since he had taken over his predecessor’s sticks at Balliol, adding such luxuries and artistic embellishments as his youthful fancy prompted. He had been interested then with the undergraduate’s pleasure in his emancipation from the Etonian’s dependence. He was interested now. He felt as if he had been furnishing a doll’s house for the occupation of a talking doll, so childishly simple did Lisa’s intellect seem to him. He took a pleasure in the task, and exercised taste and common sense in every detail.
The rooms were furnished in less than a week, for the furniture was of the simplest, and all ready to his hand at a West End upholsterer’s. He had but to make his selection from a variety ofstyles, all graceful, artistic, and inexpensive. At the end of the week he sent the livery brougham to carry aunt and niece and boy to their new home. He sent Fiordelisa a little note by the coachman.
“Your house is ready. I shall call at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon to take a cup of tea in your drawing-room, and to hear if you approve of my furnishing.”
He received one of Lisa’s ill-written letters by the next morning’s post:—
“The rooms are lovely; everything is as pretty as a picture or a dream; but why did you not come this afternoon to let us thank you? To-morrow is so far off.”
This little letter induced punctuality. He was at Lisa’s door on the stroke of the hour. The afternoon light was shining in at the south windows. The sun shone golden over the western river. There were daffodils in a glass vase on the little white-wood table in the oriel, and the new cups and saucers that he had chosen were set out upon a bamboo table with many shelves. Aunt and niece were neatly dressed in their black merino gowns, and the little boy was playing with a set of bricks in a corner of the room, silently happy. Aunt and niece poured out their gratitude in a gush of Italian and English, curiously intermixed. Never was anything so pretty as this house of theirs; never so noble a benefactor as Vansittart. He could but feel happy in seeing their happiness. He had never been so near forgetting that scene of blood in the Venetian caffè.
He stayed for an hour or so, sipped half a cup of straw-coloured tea which Lisa fondly believed was made in the English manner, and then departed, promising to call again when he had found a singing-master.
“I shall be very particular in my choice, Signora,” he said gaily. “First and foremost, the Maestro must be old and ugly, lest you should fall in love with him; next, he must be a genius, for he is to teach you in a year what most people take three years to learn; and he must be a neglected genius, because we want to get him cheap.”
“I wish the good little man who taught me the mandoline were in London,” said Lisa.
Vansittart could not echo that wish, since the good little man must needs know the story of that midnight in the caffè, and he wanted no such Venetian in London.
“We shall find some one better than your professor,” he answered; “and that reminds me I have never heard you play on your mandoline.”
“Would you like?” asked Lisa, sparkling with almost as happya smile as he remembered when she sat at the little table in the crowded Black Hat, before the beginning of trouble.
The mandoline was hanging against the wall, decked with a bunch of ribbons, red, white, and green. She took it down, and seated herself by the window, in the sunlight, and began to tinkle out “Batti, batti,” in thin, wiry tones, while the boy left his bricks on the floor and came and stood at her knee, open-mouthed, open-eyed, intently listening.
“Sing, Lisa, sing,” said la Zia.
Lisa laughed, blushed, looked shyly at Vansittart, as if she feared his critical powers, and then began that tenderest melody in a fresh young voice, whose every note was round and ripe and full of power. Nor was the singer lacking in expression; the tender legato passages were given with a pleading pathos that touched the listener almost to tears.
“Brava, Signora mia!” he cried, at the end of the song. “Your voice is worlds too good to be drowned in a middle-aged chorus. To my ear you sing ‘Batti, batti,’ as well as the most famous Zerlina I ever heard. Two years hence, or sooner perhaps, we shall have the new Venetian prima donna, Signora Vivanti, taking the town by storm. But we must make haste, and find our Maestro, able to coach you in all the great operas.”
He had to explain that word coach to Lisa, whose knowledge of English had made rapid progress during her residence in the country, and who had a quick apprehension of every new word or phrase.
He left her, charmed at the discovery that she could sing so well, and that her future was therefore so full of hope. He was pleased with her gentleness, her simplicity, her frank acceptance of his friendly services, pleased most of all by the thought that by his protection of these two lonely women he was in some measure atoning for his crime. Yet there were points upon which his conscience remained unsatisfied—questions that he wanted to ask—and to this end he dropped in upon the little family on the third floor three or four times before the Easter holidays.
He was not long in finding the ideal singing-master. An application to one of the chief music publishers and concert-givers brought him in relation with a Milanese musician, who played the ’cello at the Apollo, the new opera-house on the Embankment—the very man Vansittart wanted, ugly enough to satisfy the most jealous husband, elderly, but not old enough to fall asleep in the middle of a lesson; a man of character and talent, but not one of Fortune’s favourites, and therefore willing to give lessons on moderate terms.
This gentleman’s opinion of Signora Vivanti’s voice was most encouraging, and his manner of expressing that opinion seemed so modest and conscientious that Vansittart was fain to believe him.
“La Signora is absolutely ignorant of music,” said the Professor, “but if she is industrious and persevering she has a fortune in her throat.”
Lisa took very kindly to the Professor, and showed no lack of industry. She was an obedient pupil, and worked very patiently at her piano, which was a much harder ordeal for the untrained fingers than the solfeggi were for the birdlike voice. All her hours unclaimed by the theatre were free for study, since la Zia bore the whole burden of household cares, the marketing and cooking, and the looking after the little boy.
One afternoon, shortly before Easter, Vansittart, calling after a week’s interval, was admitted by Lisa instead of by her aunt, who usually opened the door.
La Zia had gone into London in quest of certain Italian comestibles, only procurable in the foreign settlements of Soho, and Fiordelisa was alone with her boy. It was an opportunity that Vansittart had been hoping for, the chance of questioning her about the dead man, whose manes, though in some wise propitiated as he thought, had a trick of haunting him now and again.
“Lisa,” he began gently, forgetting that he had forbidden himself that familiar address, “there is something that I want to talk about—if—if I were sure it would not grieve you too much. I want you to tell me—more—about the man you loved—the man I killed. I know what sorrow his death brought upon you; but, tell me, was there no one else to grieve for him? Had he no kindred in England—father, mother, brothers, sisters?”
“I think not,” she answered gravely. “He never spoke of any one in England, never at least as if he cared for any one. His mother was dead. I know as much as that. For the rest, he told me hardly anything about himself; except that he had been away from England for a good many years, and that he was not fond of England or English people.”
“He was called John Smith. Do you think that was his real name?”
“I don’t know. I never heard of any other.”
“And in all the time you were associated with him did he write no letters to English friends, nor receive letters from England?”
“None that I ever saw.”
“And after his lamentable death were there no inquiries made about him? Did no one come to Venice in search of a missing friend or relative?”
“No one. Except la Zia and me there was no one who cared—no one who was any the worse for his death. He had only us in all the world, I think.”
“But when he came first to Burano he came with people—friends—you told me.”
“He came with a party of Americans who were staying at the Hôtel de Rome. They were nothing to him. They had left Venice when he came to Burano the second time.”
“Do you know where he had been living before he came to Venice?”
“Living nowhere—wandering about the earth, he told me, like Satan. That is what he said of himself. He had been in Africa—in America. He called himself a rolling stone. He told me that it was only for my sake he was content to live six months in the same place.”
“Had he no friends in Venice?”
“None, except the people with whom he used to play cards at the caffès of an evening. Sometimes he would bring two or three strangers to our salon, and they would sit playing cards half the night, while la Zia and I used to fall asleep in a corner, and wake to find the morning light creeping in through the shutters. Sometimes he won a heap of gold in a single night, and then he was so kind, so kind, and he would give us presents, la Zia and me, and we had champagne for dinner next day. Sometimes, but not often, he had bad luck for a whole night, and that used to make him angry.”
“Did he never tell you where he was born and reared, or what kind of life he led before he took to wandering over the face of the earth?”
“Never. He did not like to talk about England or his early life.”
Never! There was no more to be heard. There was infinite relief to Vansittart’s mind in this blank history. The life he had taken was an isolated life—a bubble on the stream of time, that burst, and vanished. He had broken no mother’s heart; he had desolated no home; he had made no gap in a family circle. The man had been a worthless nomad; and his death had brought sorrow upon no one but this peasant and her kinswoman.
Their wounds were healed; their lives were made happy; and so there was an end of his crime and its consequences. Fate had been very good to him. He walked back to Charles Street with his burden so far lightened that he thought he might come eventually to forget that he had ever taken a fellow-creature’s life, that he had ever carried about with him any guilty secret.
Easter was close at hand, and he was to spend Easter at Redwold Towers, within walking distance of Eve Marchant’s cottage. Easter was to decide his fate, perhaps.