CHAPTER XIV.
AS A SPIRIT FROM DREAM TO DREAM.
Lady Hartley, once being reconciled to the inevitable, was full of kindness for her brother’s future wife. Eve had seen nothing of London and its gaieties, and as the Hartleys had taken a house in Bruton Street for the season, it seemed only a natural thing to take her up to town with them, and initiate her into some of the pleasures to which her future position would entitle her.
“And when you are married I can present you,” she told Eve. “It isn’t worth while going through that ordeal till next year. You will have plenty to do between now and midsummer in getting your trousseau ready.”
Eve blushed, and was silent for a few minutes, and then, as she was alone with Lady Hartley in the morning-room at Redwold, she took courage, and said—
“I’m afraid my trousseau will be a very small one. I asked my father last night what he could do for me, and he said fifty pounds would be the utmost he could give me. It wouldn’t be overmuch if I were going to marry a curate, would it?”
“My dearest Eve, fifty pounds will go a long way, as I shall manage things. Remember I am going to be your sister, a real sister, not a sham one, and while we are buying the trousseau your purse and mine shall be one.”
“Oh, I couldn’t allow that. I couldn’t let myself sponge upon you. I would rather be married in white alpaca.”
“My child, you shall not be married in alpaca. And as for sponging upon me, well, if you are so mightily proud you can pay me back every shilling I spend for you, a year or so hence, out of your pin-money.”
“My pin-money,” repeated Eve. “Father told me how generously Mr. Vansittart had offered to settle an income upon me—upon me who bring him nothing, not even a respectable trousseau.”
“Now, Eve, I won’t hear a word more about the trousseau, until we are going about shopping together.”
“You are too kind, yet I can’t help feeling it hard to begin by taxing your generosity. Isn’t it the custom for the bride to bring the house linen in her trousseau?”
“Oh, in bourgeois families no doubt, and with young people just setting up in the world; butMerewood is provided with linen. You can’t suppose mother and Jack have lived there without tablecloths or dusters. There is nothing for you to think about, Eve, but your own frocks, and we will think about them together. I adore shopping, and all the frivolities of life.”
Ten days later Eve was in London, a petted guest in one of the prettiest houses in Bruton Street. Lady Hartley had the knack of beautifying any house she lived in, even a furnished house, a tent that was to be shifted at the end of the season. Huge boxes of flowers were sent up from Redwold every other day to decorate those London rooms, and not content with this floral decoration, Maud Hartley was always buying things—china, lamps, baskets, elegant frivolities of all kinds, to make the hired house homelike.
She would apologize to her husband in an airy way for each fresh extravagance. “That pretty china plaque caught my eye at Howell and James’s while Eve and I were looking at their silks,” she would say.
Sir Hubert complained laughingly that if the Kohinoor were for sale at a London jeweller’s it would inevitably catch Maud’s eye.
“And her eye once caught she is hypnotized,” said Sir Hubert. “She must buy.”
Charles Street and Bruton Street are very near. Vansittart could run over, as his sister called it, at any and every hour of the day; and the result of this vicinity was that he lived more in his sister’s house than in his mother’s. But Mrs. Vansittart was kind, and seemed really pleased with her future daughter-in-law; so when Jack was not in Bruton Street Eve was in Charles Street, at luncheon sometimes, but oftener at afternoon tea, and at cosy little dinners, in the arrangement of which Mrs. Vansittart excelled. She knew a great many people in London, military, clerical, legal, literary, and artistic, and she knew how to blend her society and bring people together who really liked to meet each other.
This world of London in the season was a new world to Eve Marchant; these homes in which the pinch of poverty, the burden of debt, had never been felt, had a new atmosphere. Her spirits, gay even in the midst of household care, rose in these happier circles, and she charmed all who met her by her spontaneous graces of mind and manner, her quickness to perceive, her ready appreciation of wit and sense in others.
For Vansittart that month of May in the great city was a period of consummate happiness. The freshness of Eve’s feelings gave a new flavour to the commonest things. Parks and gardens, picture-galleries, concerts and theatres, were all new to her. Only on therarest occasions had she been gratified by an evening in London and the sight of a famous actor. Her father had always excused himself from taking his daughters to any public amusements on the plea of poverty.
All the Marchant girls had known of London began and ended in the drapers’ shops and the after-season sales. To travel to town by an early train, third class, to tramp about all day in mud or dust, as the case might be, snatching a skimped luncheon at some homely pastry-cook’s, was the utmost they had known of metropolitan pleasures; and even days so unluxurious had been holidays for them. To see the shop windows, to have the spending of a little money, ever so little, meant happiness. It was only when they had emptied their purses that the shadow of care descended upon them, and they began to doubt whether they had invested their pittance wisely.
Now Eve moved about like a queen, among people who never had to think of money. She was taken to see everything that was worth seeing; to hear everything that was worth hearing. She saw all the picture-galleries, and learnt to discriminate between all the schools of modern art. She heard Sarasate, andHollmann, and Menter, and all the great instrumentalists of her epoch. She never heard of cabs or omnibuses, or fares, or money given for tickets. She was carried hither and thither in a luxurious barouche or a snug brougham, and her place at concert and play was always ready for her—one of the best places in the hall or the theatre. The dressmakers, and bootmakers, and milliners to whom Lady Hartley took her never talked of money; indeed they seemed almost to shudder at any allusion to that vulgar drudge ’twixt man and man. The people at the tailor’s were as interested in the gowns and coats they were to make for her as if they had been works of art for which fame would be the sole recompense. The Frenchwoman who was to make her wedding-gown poohpoohed the question of cost. Expensive, this frisé velvet for the train—yes, that might be, but she would rather make Mademoiselle a present of the fabric than that, with her tall and graceful figure, she should wear anything commonplace or insignificant. Art for art’s sake was ostensibly the motto for all Bond Street.
And Eve had so much to think of that she could not think very seriously about her trousseau. She let Lady Hartley order what she pleased. She, Eve, had her lover to think about; and that was an absorbing theme. She knew his footstep on the pavement below the open window; she knew the sound of the bell when he rang it. If the weather were wet, and he came from Charles Street in a hansom, she knew his way of throwing back the cab doors before the wheels stopped. When he was absent, all her life was made up of thinking about him and listening for his coming. In that morninghour in the drawing-room before he arrived she might have sat to Sir Frederick Leighton for “Waiting” or “Expectancy.”
It was scarcely strange that while John Vansittart was so absorbed in the new delight of his life, John Smith was just a little neglectful of his protégées in Saltero’s Mansion, Chelsea. John Smith had, indeed, no consciousness of being neglectful. If the image of Lisa flashed across his mind in any moment of his full and happy day, it came and went together with the comfortable thought that he had done his duty to that young woman. She had her aunt, her bright and pretty home, her singing-master, and all the delightful hopes and ambitions of an artist who has discovered that she has fortune within her reach. Had he thought of Lisa all day long, he could never have pictured her otherwise than happy and contented.
He was at Covent Garden one evening with his sister and his betrothed, and he saw the Venetian amidst her troops of companions. The opera wasWilliam Tell, and Lisa was in short petticoats and Swiss bodice, with gold chains about her neck and arms, and gold daggers in her hair. She looked very pretty, amidst that heterogeneous crew of young, middle-aged, and elderly. He was in the stalls, and at a considerable distance from the stage, and those dark eyes did not find him out and fasten upon him as they had done that other night when he was in Lady Davenant’s box. The sight of her reminded him that it was nearly a month since he had called upon the aunt and niece, and that she ought to have made some progress with her musical training in the interval, progress enough, at any rate, to make the childish creature anxious to report herself to him.
Eve was to be engaged at her dressmaker’s on the following afternoon, in a solemn ordeal described as “trying on;” and Vansittart had been warned by his sister that he must not expect to be favoured with her society until the evening, when they were all to dine in Charles Street. It seemed to him that he could hardly employ this afternoon better than in visiting Fiordelisa and her aunt, whose warm southern hearts would be wounded perhaps if he should seem to have lost all interest in their welfare.
The day was delightful—one of those brilliant afternoons in May which give to West End London the air of an earthly paradise; a paradise of smart shops and smart people, thorough-bred horses and newly built carriages, liveries spick and span from the tailor’s; flowers everywhere—in the carriages, in the shops, on the kerbstone—flowers and fine clothes and spring sunshine. Vansittart walked to Chelsea, glad of an excuse for a walk after the habitual carriage or hansom. He had promised to look at some pictures in Tite Street upon this very afternoon—pictures of that advanced Belgian school whose work he would scarcely care to show to Miss Marchant withouta previous inspection—so he availed himself of the opportunity, and called at the painter’s house on his way to Saltero’s Mansion.
He found a room full of people, looking at pictures set round on easels draped with terra-cotta silk, criticizing freely and talking prodigiously. He found himself in the midst of an artistic tea-party. There was a copper kettle singing over a spirit-lamp on a table crowded with Spanish irises, and there was the painter’s young English wife, in an orange-coloured Liberty gown, pouring out tea, and smiling at the praises of her husband.
The painter was no phlegmatic Fleming, but a fiery son of French Flanders. He came from the red country between Namur and Liege, and had been reared and educated in the latter city.
He was standing by the largest of his pictures—a scene from “Manon Lescaut”—and listening to the criticisms of a little knot of people, all ecstatic, and among these élite of the art-loving world Vansittart was surprised to see Mr. Sefton.
Sefton turned at the sound of Vansittart’s voice. They had met a good many times since Easter, and in a good many houses, for it was one of Sefton’s attributes to be seen everywhere; but Vansittart had not expected to find him at a comparatively unknown painter’s tea-party.
“Delightful picture, ain’t it?” he asked carelessly. “Full of truth and feeling. How is Miss Marchant to-day? I thought she looked a little pale and fagged at Lady Heavyside’s last night, as if her first season were taking it out of her.”
“I don’t think my sister would let her do too much.” They had drifted towards the tea-table, and the crowd had stranded them in a corner, where they could talk at their ease. “I did not know you were by way of being an art critic.”
“I am by way of being everything. I give myself up to sport—body and bones—all the winter. I let my poor little intellect hibernate from the first of September till I have been at the killing of a May fox; and then I turn my back upon rusticity, put on my frock-coat and cylinder hat, and see as much as I can of the world of art and letters. To that end I have chosen this street for my summer habitation.”
“You live here—in Tite Street?”
“Is that so surprising? Tite Street is not a despicable locality. We consider ourselves rather smart.”
“I should have looked for you nearer the clubs.”
“I am by no means devoted to the clubs. I like my own nest and my own newspapers. Is not this charming?”
He turned to admire a cabinet picture on a draped easel—“Esmeralda and the Captain of the Guard;” one of those pictures which Vansittart would have preferred Eve Marchant not to see,but over which æsthetic maids and matrons were expatiating rapturously.
Vansittart did not stop to take tea, meaning to gratify Lisa by allowing her to entertain him with the mild infusion she called by that name. He spoke to the two or three people he knew, praised the pictures in very good French to the artist, who knew no English, and slipped out of the sultry room, redolent of violets and tea-cake, into the fresh air blowing up the river from the woods and pastures of Bucks and Berks.
He had not walked above half a dozen yards upon the Embankment when he heard the sound of hurrying footsteps behind him, and an ungloved hand was thrust through his arm, and a joyous voice exclaimed breathlessly, “At last! You were going to see me? I thought you had forgotten us altogether.”
“That was very wrong of you, Signora,” he answered, gently disengaging himself from the olive-complexioned hand, plump and tapering, albeit somewhat broad—such a hand asTitian painted by the score, perhaps, before he began to paint Cardinal Princes and great ladies.
He did not want to walk along the Chelsea Embankment, in the broad glare of day, with the Venetian hanging affectionately upon him. That kind of thing might pass on the Lido, or in the Royal Garden by the canal, but here the local colour was wanting.
“It is ages since you have been near us,” protested Fiordelisa, poutingly. “I am sure you must have forgotten us.”
“Not I, Signora. Englishmen don’t forget their friends so easily. I have been in the country till—till quite lately. And you—tell me how you have been getting on with your singing-master.”
“He shall tell you,” cried Fiordelisa, flashing one of her brightest looks upon him. “He pretends to be monstrously pleased with me. He declares that in a few months, perhaps even sooner, he will get me an engagement at one of the small theatres, to sing in a comic opera. They will give me ever so much more money than I am earning at Coveny Gardeny.”
The Venetian often put a superfluous vowel at the end of a word, not yet having mastered our severe terminal consonants. “The maestro is to have some of the money for his trouble, but that is fair, is it not?”
“Fair that he should take a small percentage, perhaps, but not more.”
“A percentage? What is that?”
Vansittart explained.
“But to sing in your English comic opera I must speak English ever so much better than I do now,” pursued Lisa, “and for that I am working, oh, so hard. I learn grammar. I read story-books;‘Bootle’s Baby;’ the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’ Oh, how I have laughed and cried over that Vicar and his troubles—and Olivia—Olivia who was so deceived—and so happy at last.”
“Happy, with a scoundrel,” exclaimed Vansittart.
“Ah, but she loved him. One does not mind how much scoundrel if one loves a man.”
“A bad principle, Signorina. It is better to love a good man ever so little than a scoundrel ever so much.”
“No, no, no. It is the loving much that means happiness,” argued Lisa, and then she expatiated upon her English studies. “La Zia and I go to the theatre when there is no performance at Coveny Gardeny. We sit in the pit, where the people are kind, and make room for us because we are foreigners. Signor Zinco says there is no better way of learning English than in listening to the actors in good plays. Oh, how I listen! In three months from this day people will take me for an Englishwoman,” she said finally.
“Never, Lisa, never,” he said, laughingly contemplative of the sparkling olive face, the great dark eyes with golden lights in them, the careless arrangement of the coarse black hair, the supple figure in its plain black gown, and the essentially foreign air which years of residence in England would hardly obliterate. “Never, Si’ora! Your every glance is eloquent of Venice and her sister isles. It seems almost a crime to keep you captive in this sunless city of ours.”
“Oh, but I adore London,” she exclaimed, “and your London is not sunless. See how the sun is shining on the river this afternoon; not as it shines on the lagunes in May, I grant you, but it is a very pretty piccolo sole.”
“And la Zia,” asked Vansittart; “she is well, I hope?”
“She is more than well. She is getting fat. Oh, so fat. She is as happy as the day is long. She loves your London, the King’s Road most of all. At night there are barrows, fish, vegetables, everything. She can do her marketing by lamplight, and the streets are almost as full and as gay as the Merceria. La Zia was never so happy in all her life as she is in London. She never had so much to eat.”
They were near Saltero’s Mansion by this time.
“You will come in and let me make you some tea, won’t you?” pleaded Lisa.
“Not this afternoon, Si’ora. I wanted to see you, to know that all was going well with you. Having done that, I must go back to the West End to—to keep an appointment.”
He was thinking that possibly Eve’s “trying on” would be finished in time for him to snatch half an hour’s tête-à-tête in one of the Bruton Street drawing-rooms, before she dressed for dinner. Therewere three drawing-rooms, in a diminishing perspective, dwindling almost to a point, the third and inner room too small to serve any purpose but flirtation, and here the lovers could usually find seclusion.
Lisa pouted and looked unhappy.
“You might stay and take tea with me,” she said; “la Zia will be home soon.”
“La Zia is out, then?”
“Yes; she has taken Paolo to Battersea Park for the afternoon. The rehearsal for the new opera keeps me all day long, and la Zia takes the boy for his daily walk; but it is past five, and they will be home as soon as I am, I dare say.”
“I will come this way again in a week or so, Si’ora.”
“You are very unkind,” protested Lisa, in her impulsive way; and then, with one of those sudden changes which so well became her childish beauty, she exclaimed, “No, no; forgive me; you are always kind—kind, kindest of men. Promise you will come again soon.”
“I promise,” he said, stopping short and offering his hand.
“Then I’ll walk back just a little piece of way with you—only as far as the big house with the swans.”
Lisa’s company on Cheyne Walk was an honour which Vansittart would have gladly escaped. She was too pretty and too peculiar-looking not to attract notice; and there was the tea-party in Tite Street, with its little crowd of worldlings, any of whom would be curious as to his companion, should he by chance be seen in this society. He did not want to be rude, for the lace-girl from Burano was a creature of strong feelings, and was easily wounded.
“I am in a desperate hurry, Si’ora.”
“You were not in a hurry when I overtook you just now. You were walking slowly. You cannot walk faster than I. At Burano I never used to walk. I always ran.”
“Poverina! How quickly you must have used up your island.”
“Yes; it was like a prison. I used to watch the painted sails of the fishing-boats, and long for them to carry me away to any place different from that island, where I knew every face and every paving-stone. That is why I love your London, in spite of fogs and grey skies. It is so big, so big.”
She stopped, with clasped hands and flashing eyes. A street boy wheeled round to look at her, and gave a low whistle of admiring surprise; and at the same instant Sefton turned a street corner, came across the road, and passed close to Vansittart and his companion.
Of all men living, this man was the last whom Vansittart would have cared to meet under such conditions.