CHAPTER XIX.
“HE SAID, ‘SHE HAS A LOVELY FACE.’”
December’s fogs covered London as with a funeral pall, and hansom and four-wheeler crept along the curb more slowly than a funeral procession. It was the winter season, the season of cattle-shows, andtheatres, and middle-class suburban gaieties, and snug little dinners and luncheons in the smart world, casual meetings of birds of passage, halting for a few days between one country visit and another, or preparing for migration to sunnier skies. There were just people enough in Mayfair to make London pleasant; and there were people enough in South Kensington and Tyburnia to fill the favourite theatres to overflowing.
A new comic opera had been produced at the Apollo at the beginning of the month, and a new singer had taken the town by storm.
The opera was calledFanchonette. It was a story of the Regency; the Regency of Philip of Orleans and hisroués; the age of red heels and lansquenet, of little suppers and deadly duels; a period altogether picturesque, profligate, and adapted to comic opera.
Fanchonette was a girl who sang in the streets; a girl born in the gutter, vulgar, audacious, irresistible, and the good genius of the piece.
Fanchonette was Fiordelisa—and Fiordelisa in her own skin; good-natured, impetuous, a creature of smiles and tears; buoyant as a sea-gull on the crest of a summer wave; rejoicing in her strength and her beauty as the Sun rejoiceth to run his race.
What people most admired in this new songstress was her perfectabandon, and that abundant power of voice which seemed strong enough to have sustained the most exactingrôlein the classic repertoire, with as little effort as the light music of opera bouffe—the power of a Malibran or a Tietjens. The music ofFanchonettewas florid, and the part had been written up for the new singer. Manager, artists, and author had thought Mervyn Hawberk, the composer, reckless almost to lunacy when he elected to entrust the leading part in his new opera to an untried singer; but Hawberk had made Signora Vivanti rehearse the music in his own music-room, not once, but many times, before he resolved upon this experiment; and having so resolved, he turned her over to Mr. Watling, the author of the libretto, to be coached in the acting of her part; and Mr. Watling was fain to confess that the young Venetian’s vivacity and quickness of apprehension, the force and fire, the magnetism of her southern nature, made the work of dramatic education a very different thing to the weary labour of grinding his ideas into the bread-and-butter misses who were sometimes sent to him as aspirants for dramatic fame. This girl was so quick to learn and to perceive, and struggled so valiantly with the difficulties of a foreign language. And her Venetian accent, with its soft slurring of consonants, was so quaint and pretty. Mr. Watling took heart, and began to think that his friend and partner, Mervyn Hawberk, had some justification for his faith in this untried star.
The result fully justified Hawberk’s confidence. There were twoprincipal ladies in the opera—the patrician heroine, written for a light soprano, and the gutter heroine, a mezzo soprano, whose music made a greater call upon the singer than the former character, which had been written especially for the Apollo’s established prima donna, a lady with a charming birdlike voice, flexible and brilliant, but a little worn with six years’ constant service, and a handsome face which was somewhat the worse for those six years in a London theatre. There could have been no greater contrast to Miss Emmeline Danby, with her sharp nose, blonde hair, sylph-like figure and canary-bird voice, than this daughter of St. Mark, whose splendour of colouring and fulness of form seemed in perfect harmony with the power and compass of her voice. The town, without being tired of Miss Danby, was at once caught and charmed by this new singer. Her blue-black hair and flashing eyes, her easy movements, her broken English, her girlish laughter, were all new to the audience of the Apollo, who hitherto had been called upon to applaud only the highest training of voice and person. Here was a girl who, like the character she represented, had evidently sprung from the proletariat, and who came dancing on to the London stage, fresh, fearless, unsophisticated, secure of the friendly feeling of her audience, and giving full scope to her natural gaiety of heart.
Signora Vivanti’s personality was a new sensation; and to ablaséLondon public there is nothing so precious as a new sensation. Signor Zinco proved a true prophet. That touch of vulgarity which he had spoken of deprecatingly to Vansittart had made Lisa’s fortune. Had she come straight from the Milan Conservatorio, cultivated to the highest pitch, approved by Verdi himself, she would hardly have succeeded as she had done, with all the rough edges of her grand voice unpolished, and all the little caprices and impertinences of a daughter of the people unchastened and unrestrained.
Lisa took the town by storm, and “Fanchonette,” in her little mob cap and striped petticoat, appeared on half the match-boxes that were sold by the London tobacconists; and “Fanchonette,” with every imaginable turn of head and shoulder, smiled in the windows of the Stereoscopic Company, and of all the fashionable stationers.
Among the many who admired the new singer one of the most enthusiastic was Wilfred Sefton, who generally spent a week or two of the early winter in his bachelor quarters at Chelsea, for the express purpose of seeing the new productions at the fashionable theatres, and of dining with his chosen friends.
Sefton was passionately fond of music, and knew more about it than is known to most country gentlemen. The loftiest classical school was not too high or too serious for him; and the lightest opera bouffe was not too low. He had a taste sufficiently catholicto range from Wagner to Offenbach. He was a profound believer in Sullivan, and he had a warm affection for Massenet.
Fanchonettewas by far the cleverest opera which Mervyn Hawberk had written; and Sefton was at the Apollo on the opening night, charmed with the music, and amused by the new singer. He went a second, a third, a fourth time during his fortnight in town; and the oftener he heard the music the better he liked it; and the oftener he saw Signora Vivanti the more vividly was he impressed by her undisciplined graces of person and manner. She had just that spontaneity which had ever exercised the strongest influence over his mind and fancy. He had passed unmoved through the furnace of the best society, had danced and flirted, and had been on the best possible terms with some of the handsomest women in London, and had yet remained heart-whole. He had never been so near falling in love in all seriousness as with Eve Marchant; and Eve’s chief charm had been her frank girlishness, her unsophisticated delight in life.
Well, he was cured of his passion for Eve, cured by that cold douche of indifference which the young lady had poured upon him; cured by the feeling of angry scorn which had been evoked by her preference for Vansittart; for a man who, in worldly position, in good looks, and in culture, Wilfred Sefton regarded as his inferior. He could not go on caring for a young woman who had shown herself so deficient in taste as not to prefer the dubious advances of a Sefton to the honest love of a Vansittart. He dismissed Eve from his thoughts for the time being; but not without prophetic musings upon a day when she might be wearied of her commonplace husband, and more appreciative of Mr. Sefton’s finer qualities of intellect and person. He was thus in a measure fancy free as he lolled in his stall at the Apollo, and listened approvingly to Lisa’s full and bell-like tones in the quartette, which was already being played on all the barrel-organs in London, a quartette in which the composer had borrowed the dramatic form of the famous quartette inRigoletto, and adapted it to a serio-comic situation. He was free to admire this exuberant Italian beauty, free to pursue a divinity whom he judged an easy conquest. He and the composer were old friends—Hawberk being a familiar figure at all artistic gatherings in the artistic suburb of Chelsea—and from the composer Sefton had heard something of the new prima donna’s history. He had been told that she was a daughter of the Venetian people, a lace-maker from one of the islands; that she had come to London with her aunt, to seek her fortune; and that her musical training had been accomplished within the space of a year, under the direction of Signor Zinco, the fat little Italian who played the ’cello at the Apollo.
Such a history did not suggest inaccessible beauty, and there wasa touch of originality in it which awakened Sefton’s interest. The very name of Venice is a sound of enchantment for some minds; and Sefton, although a man of the world, was not without romantic yearnings. He was always glad to escape from beaten tracks.
He had been troubled and perplexed from the night of Signora Vivanti’sdébutby the conviction that he had seen that brilliant face before, and by the inability to fix the when or the where. Yes, that vivid countenance was decidedly familiar. It was the individual and not the type which he knew—but where and when—where and when? The brain did its work in the usual unconscious way, and one night, sitting lazily in his stall, dreamily watching the scene, and the actress whose image seemed to fill the stage to the exclusion of all other figures, the memory of a past rencontre flashed suddenly upon the dreamer. The face was the face of the foreign girl he had seen on the Chelsea Embankment, hanging upon Vansittart’s arm.
“By Heaven, there is something fatal in it,” thought Sefton. “Are the threads always to cross in the web of our lives? He has worsted me with Eve; and now—now am I to fall in love with his cast-off mistress?”
He had been quick to make inferences from that little scene on the Embankment; the girl hanging on Vansittart’s arm, looking up at him pleadingly, passionately. What could such a situation mean but a love affair of the most serious kind?
Had there been any doubt in Sefton’s mind as to the nature of the intrigue, Vansittart’s evident embarrassment would have settled the question. Mr. Sefton was the kind of man who always thinks worst about everybody, and prejudice had predisposed him to think badly of Eve’s admirer.
This idea of the singer’s probable relations with Vansittart produced a strong revulsion of feeling. An element of scorn was now mixed with his admiration of the lovely Venetian. Until now he had approached her with deference, sending her a bouquet every evening, with his card, but making no other advance. But the day after his discovery he sent her a diamond bracelet, and asked with easy assurance to be allowed to call upon her.
The bracelet was returned to him, with a stately letter signed Zinco; a letter wherein the ’cello player begged that his pupil might be spared the annoyance of gifts, which she could but consider as insults in disguise.
This refusal stimulated Sefton to renewed ardour. He forgot everything except the rebuff, which had taken him by surprise. He put the bracelet in a drawer of his writing-table, and turned the key upon it with a smile.
“She will be wiser by-and-by,” he said to himself.
He went back to the country next day, and tried to forget SignoraVivanti’s eyes, and the thrilling sweetness of her voice, tried to banish that seductive image altogether from his mind, while he devoted himself to the conquest of an untried hunter, a fine bay mare, whose pace was better than her manners, and who showed the vulgar strain in her pedigree very much as Signora Vivanti showed her peasant ancestry.
The season was not a good one, and after a couple of days with the hounds a hard frost set in, and the bay mare’s evolutions were confined to the straw-yard, where she might walk on her hind legs to her heart’s content; while her owner had nothing to do but brood upon the image that had taken possession of his fancy. It was only when he found himself amidst the tranquil surroundings of his country seat that he knew the strength of his infatuation for the Venetian singer.
He looked back upon his life as he strolled round the billiard table, cue in hand, trying a shot now and then yawningly, as the snow came softly down outside the Tudor windows, and gradually clouded and muffled garden and park. He looked back upon his life, wondering whether he had done the best for himself, starting from such an advantageous standpoint; whether, in his own careless phraseology, he had got change for his shilling.
He had always had plenty of money; he had always been his own master; he had always studied his own pleasure; and yet there had been burdens. His first love affair had turned out badly; so badly that there were people in Sussex who still gave him the cold shoulder on account of that old story. He had admired a good many women since he left Eton; but he had never seen the woman for whom he cared to sacrifice his liberty, for whose sake he could bind himself for all his life to come. He knew himself well enough to know that all his passions were short-lived, and that, however deeply he might be in love to-day, satiety might come to-morrow.
He was ambitious, and he meant to marry a woman who could bring him increase of fortune and social status. He was not to be drifted into matrimony by the caprice of the hour. Much as he had admired Eve Marchant, he had never thought of marrying her. A penniless girl with a disreputable father and a bevy of half-educated sisters was no mate for him. He had allowed himself full license in admiring her, and in letting her see that he admired her; and he had wondered that she should receive that open admiration as anything less than an honour.
And then a fool had stepped in to spoil sport—a besotted fool who took this girl for his wife, careless of her surroundings, defiant of Fate, which might overtake him in the shape of a blackguard brother. He felt only contempt for Vansittart when he thought over the story.
“He might have been content with his Venetian sweetheart,” hethought. She is ever so much handsomer than Eve, and she obviously adored him; while that kind of ménage has the convenience of being easily got rid of when a man tires of it.
The snow lay deep on all the country round before nightfall, and Sefton went back to his nest in Chelsea on the following afternoon, and was in a stall at the Apollo in the evening. He tried to persuade himself that the music was the chief attraction.
“Your music is like a vice, Hawberk,” he told the composer, at a tea-party next day. “It takes possession of a man. I go night after night to hearFanchonette, though I know I am wasting my time.”
“Thanks.Fanchonetteis a very pretty opera, quite the best thing I have done,” replied Hawberk, easily; “and it is very well sung and acted. The singing is good all round, but Lisa Vivanti is a pearl.”
“You are enthusiastic,” said Sefton; and then smiling at the composer’s young wife, who went everywhere with her husband, and whose province was to wear smart frocks and look pretty, “You must keep your eye upon him, Mrs. Hawberk, lest this Venetian siren should prove as fatal as the Lurlei.”
“No fear,” cried Hawberk. “Little Lisa is as straight as an arrow and as good as gold. She lives as sedately as a nun, with a comfortable dragon in the shape of an aunt. She would hardly look at a ripping diamond bracelet which some cad sent her the other day. She just tossed bracelet and letter over to her old singing master, and told him to send it back to the giver. She has no desire for carriages and horses and fine raiment. She comes to the theatre in a shabby little black frock, and she lives like a peasant on a third floor in this neighbourhood.”
“That will not last,” said Sefton. “Yourrara aviswill soon realize her own value. The management will be called upon to provide her with a stable and a chef, and diamonds will be accepted freely as fitting tribute to her talents.”
“I don’t believe it. I think she is a genuine, honest, right-minded young woman, and that she will gang her ain gait in spite of all counter influences. There may have been some love affair in the past that has sobered her. I think there has been; for there is a little boy who calls her mother, and for whom she takes no trouble to account. I will vouch for my little Lisa, and I have allowed Mrs. Hawberk to go and see her.”
“She is quite too sweet,” assented the lady; “such a perfectly naïve little person.”
“Upon my honour,” said Hawberk, as his wife fluttered away and was absorbed in a group of acquaintances, “I believe Vivanti is a good woman, in spite of the little peccadillo in a sailor suit.”
“I am very glad to hear it, for I want you to introduce me to the lady.”
“Oh, but really now that is just what I don’t care about doing. She is keeping herself to herself, and is working conscientiously at her musical education. She is a very busy woman, and she has no idea of society, or its ways and manners. What can she want with such an acquaintance as you?”
“Nothing; but I very much want to know her; and I pledge myself to approach her with all the respect due to the best woman in England.”
“To approach her, yes; I can believe that. No doubt Lucifer approached Eve with all possible courtesy; yet the acquaintance ended badly. I don’t see that any good could arise from your acquaintance with my charming Venetian.”
“I understand,” said Sefton, with an aggrieved air; “she is so charming that you would like to keep her all to yourself.”
“Oh, come now, that’s a very weak thing in the way of sneers,” exclaimed the composer. “I hope I am secure from any insinuations of that sort. Look here, Sefton, I’m just a bit afraid of you; but if you promise to act on the square I’ll get my wife to send you a card for a Sunday evening, at which I believe she is going to get Vivanti to sing for her. That is always the first thing Lavinia thinks of if I venture to introduce her to a singer.”
“That would be very friendly of you, and I promise to act on the square. I am not a married man, and I am my own master. If I were desperately in love——”
“You wouldn’t marry a Venetian lace-maker, with a damaged reputation. I know you too well to believe you capable of that sort of thing.”
“Nobody knows of what a man is capable; least of all the man himself,” said Sefton, sententiously.
Mr. and Mrs. Hawberk lived in a smart little house in that dainty and artistic region of Cheyne Walk, which even yet retains a faint flavour of Don Saltero, of Bolingbroke and Walpole, of Chelsea buns and Chelsea china, Ranelagh routs, and Thames watermen. Mr. Hawberk’s house was in a terrace at right angles with the Embankment, but further west than Tite Street. It was a new house, with all the latest improvements, and all the latest fads—tiny panes to Queen Anne windows, admitting the minimum of light and not overmuch air; a spacious ingle nook in a miniature dining-room, whereby facetious friends had frequently been heard to ask Mrs. Hawberk which was the ingle nook and which was the dining-room.
The house was quaint and pretty, and being entirely furnished with Japaneseries was a very fascinating toy, if not altogether the most commodious thing in the way of houses. For party-giving it was delightful, for less than a hundred people choked every inchof space in rooms and staircase, and suggested a tremendous reception: so that the smallest of Mrs. Hawberk’s parties seemed a crush.
Sefton arriving at half-past ten, only half an hour after the time on Mrs. Hawberk’s card, found the drawing-rooms blocked with people, mostly standing, and could see no more of Signora Vivanti than if she had been on the other side of the river; but the people in the doorway were talking about her, and their talk informed him that she was somewhere in the innermost angle of the back drawing-room, behind the grand piano, and that she was going to sing.
Then there came an authoritative “Silence, please,” from Hawberk, followed by a sudden hush as of sentences broken off in the middle, and anon a firm hand played the symphony to Sullivan’sOrpheus, and the grand mezzo soprano voice rolled out the grand Shakesperean words set to noble music. The choice of the song was a delicate compliment to Hawberk’s master in art, who was among Mrs. Hawberk’s guests.
The Venetian accent was still present in Lisa’s pronunciation, but her English had improved as much as her vocalization, under Hawberk’s training. He had taken extraordinary pains with this particular song, and every note rang out clear as crystal, pure as thrice-refined gold. The composer’s “Brava, bravissima!” was heard amidst the applause that followed the song.
Sefton elbowed his way through the crowd—as politely as was consistent with a determination to reach a given point—and contrived to mingle with the group about the singer. She was standing by the piano in a careless attitude, dressed in a black velvet gown, which set off the yellowish whiteness of her shoulders and full round throat. Clasped round that statuesque throat, she wore a collet necklace of diamonds, splendid in size and colour, a necklace which could not have been bought for less than six or seven hundred pounds.
“So,” thought Sefton. “Those diamonds don’t quite come into Hawberk’s notion of the lady’s character.”
Mr. Sefton did not know that, after the manner of Venetian women, Lisa looked upon jewellery as an investment, and that nearly all her professional earnings since herdébutwere represented by the diamonds she wore round her neck. She and la Zia were able to live on so little, and it was such a pleasure to them to save, first to gloat over the golden sovereigns, and then to change them into precious stones. There was such a delightful feeling in being able to wear one’s fortune round one’s neck.
Mr. Hawberk had accompanied the singer, and he was still sitting at the piano, when Sefton’s eager face reminded him of his promise.
“Signora, allow me to introduce another of your English admirers.Mr. Sefton, a connoisseur in the way of music, and a cosmopolitan in the way of speech.”
Lisa turned smilingly to the stranger. “You speak Italian,” she said in her own language, and Sefton replying in very good Tuscan, they were soon on easy terms; and presently he had the delight of taking her down to the supper-room, where there was a long narrow table loaded with delicacies, and a perpetual flow of champagne.
Lisa enjoyed herself here as frankly as she had enjoyed herself at the sign of the Black Hat, in the Piazza di San Marco. She was the same unsophisticated Lisa still, in the matter of quails and lobster mayonnaise, creams and jellies. She stood at the table and eat all the good things that Sefton brought her, and drank three or four glasses of champagne with jovial unconcern, and talked of the people and the gowns they were wearing in her soft southern tongue, secure of not being understood, though Sefton warned her occasionally that there might be other people in the room besides themselves who knew the language of Dante and Boccaccio.
Never had he talked to any beautiful woman who was so thoroughly unsophisticated; and that somewhat plebeian nature had a curious charm for him. He could understand Vansittart’s infatuation for such a woman, but could not understand his giving her up for the sake of Eve Marchant, whose charms as compared with Lisa’s were
“As moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine.”
“As moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine.”
“As moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine.”
“As moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine.”
He hoped to discover all the history of that intrigue by-and-by, seeing how freely Lisa talked of herself to an acquaintance of an hour. He meant to follow up that acquaintance with all the earnestness of which he was capable.
“There are no finer diamonds in the room than your necklace,” he said, when she had been praising an ancient dowager’s jewels, gems whose beauty was not enhanced by a neck that looked as if its bony structure had been covered with one of the family parchments.
“Do you really like them?” asked Lisa, with a flashing smile.
“She doesn’t even blush for her spoil,” thought Sefton.
“I’m so glad you think them good,” continued Lisa. “They are all my fortune. The jeweller told me I should never repent buying them.”
“What, Signora, did you buy them? I thought they were the offering of some devoted admirer.”
“Do you suppose I would accept such a gift from any one except—except somebody I cared for?” she exclaimed indignantly. “A man sent me a diamond bracelet one night at the theatre—I found it in my dressing-room when I arrived—with his card. I sent it back next morning—or at least Zinco sent it back for me.”
“And I dare say you have even forgotten the man’s name?” said Sefton.
“Yes. Your English names are very ugly, and very difficult to remember. They are so short; so insignificant.”
And then she told him the history of her diamonds; how the manager of the Apollo had first doubled, and then trebled, and quadrupled her salary; how she had kept the money in her trunk, all in gold, sovereigns upon sovereigns, and how she and her aunt had counted the gold every week, and how only last Saturday she and la Zia had gone off in a cab to Piccadilly, with a bag full of gold, and had bought the diamonds, which were now shining on Fiordelisa’s throat.
“We had less than half the price of the necklace,” concluded Lisa, “but when the jeweller heard who I was, he insisted that I should take it away with me, and pay him by degrees, just as I find convenient, so I shall pay him my salary every Saturday until I am out of debt.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” said Sefton. “Do you and your aunt live upon rose leaves and dew, Signora; or how is it that you can afford to invest all your earnings in diamonds?”
“Oh, we have other money,” answered Lisa, with a defiant glance at the questioner. “I need not sing unless I like.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Sefton, strengthened in his conviction that Signora Vivanti was not altogether so “straight” as Hawberk believed, or affected to believe.
Mr. Sefton was not so confiding as the composer. He was a man prone to think badly of women, and he was inclined to think the worst of this brilliant Venetian, much as he admired her. He followed her like a shadow for the rest of the evening, escorted her up the narrow staircase, and stood near the piano while she sang, and then took her from the stifling atmosphere of the lamp-lit house to the semi-darkness of the garden, which Mrs. Hawberk had converted into a tent, shutting out the wintry sky, and enclosing the miniature lawn and surrounding shrubbery; a tent dimly lighted with fairy lamps, nestling among the foliage. Here he sat talking with Lisa in a shadowy corner, while three or four other couples murmured and whispered in other nooks and corners, and while Hawberk, feeling he had done his duty as host, smoked and drank whisky and soda with a little group of chosen friends—an actor, a journalist, a playwright, and a brace of musical critics, who had an inexhaustible flow of speech, and a deliciousunconsciousness of time.
Sefton too was unconscious of time, talking with Lisa in that soft Italian tongue, having to bend his head very near the full red lips in order to catch the Venetian elisions, the gentle, sliding syllables.
The hum of voices, the occasional ripples of laughter, the music and song, dwindled and died into silence—even the lights in the lower windows grew dim, and gradually Sefton awakened to the fact that the party was at an end, and that he and Signora Vivanti, and Hawberk’s Bohemian group yonder, were all that remained of Mrs. Hawberk’s musical evening. He bent down to look at his watch by one of the fairy lamps.
Three o’clock.
“By Jove, we are sitting out everybody else,” he said, with a pleased laugh, triumphant at the thought that he had been able to amuse and interest his companion. “Three o’clock. Very late for a musical evening. You did not know it was so late, did you, Signora?”
“No,” answered Lisa,carelessly; “but I don’t mind. I’ve been enjoying myself.”
“So have I; but it’s rather rough on Mrs. Hawberk, who may want to rest from her labours.”
“I am quite ready to go home as soon as I get my shawl,” said Lisa, rising from the low wicker chair, straight as a dart, her neck and shoulders and long bare arms looking like marble in the glimmer of the toy lamps. Sefton stood and looked at her, drinking her loveliness as if it had been a draught of wine from an enchanted cup. Oh, the charm of those Italian eyes; so brilliant, yet so soft; so darkly deep! Could there be any magic in fairyland more potent than the spell this Calypso was weaving round him?
“May I call your carriage?” he asked.
“I have no carriage. I live close by.”
“Let me see you home, then.”
She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture which meant that the question wasn’t worth disputing, and Sefton followed her across the little bit of grass to the house door. Hawberk stopped her on her way.
“What, my Vivanti not gone yet!” he cried. “I would have had another song out of you if I had known you were there. What have you and Mr. Sefton found to say to each other all this time?”
“We have found plenty to say. He has been talking Italian, which none of you stupid others can talk. It is a treat to hear my own language from some one besides la Zia. Good night, Signor. Shall I find la Signora to wish her good night?”
“No, child. La Signora Hawberkini retired to rest an hour ago, when all the respectable people had gone. She did not wait to see the last of such night-birds as you and Sefton, and these disreputable journalists here.”
“I love the night,” said Lisa, in no wise abashed. “It is ever so much nicer than day.”
The servants had vanished, but she found her wrap lying on a sofa—an old red silk shawl, aBellagio shawl, whose dinginess went ill with her velvet gown and diamond necklace; but she wrapped it about her head and shoulders, nothing caring, and she looked a real Italian peasant as she turned to Sefton in the light of the hall lamps. He admired her even more at this moment than he had admired her before—he liked to think of her as a peasant; with no womanly sensitiveness to suffer, no pride to be wounded; divided from him socially by a great gulf of difference; and so much the more surely, and so much the more lightly to be won.
They went out into the street together. It was moonlight, a February moon, cold, and sharp, and clear, with a hoar frost whitening the wintry shrubs and iron railings. Lisa caught up her velvet train, and tripped lightly along the pavement in bronze beaded slippers and bright red stockings, Sefton at her side. She would not take his arm, both hands being occupied, one clutching the silk shawl, the other holding up her skirt. The walk was of the shortest, for Saltero’s Mansion was only just round the corner; nor could Sefton detain her on the doorstep for any sentimentality about the moonlit river. She had her key in the door in a moment, and as he pushed the big, heavy door open for her, she vanished behind it with briefest “Grazie, e buona notte, caro Signor.”
There had not been time for the gentlest pressure of her strong, broad hand, or for his tender “Addio, bellissima mia,” to be heard.
But to know where she lived was something gained, and as he walked homeward humming “la donna è mobile,” he meant to follow up that advantage. He had told her that he was her near neighbour. He had gone even further, and had asked her if she would sing for him at a little tea-party, were he to give one in her honour; on which she had only laughed, and said that she had never heard of a man giving a tea-party.
The acquaintance begun so auspiciously gave Wilfred Sefton a new zest for London life. He hailed the hardening frosts of February with absolute pleasure, he for whom that month had hitherto been the cream of the hunting season. He cared nothing that his latest acquisitions, the hunters in whose perfections he still believed, whose vices he had not had time to discover, were eating their heads off in his Sussex stables. He was in his stall at the Apollo every night; and Lisa’s singing and Lisa’s beauty, and the “quips and cranks and wanton wiles” which constituted Lisa’s idea of acting, were enough for his contentment.
He waited till Wednesday before he ventured to call upon his divinity. He would gladly have presented himself at her door on Monday afternoon; but he did not want to appear too eager. Tuesday seemed a long blank day to his impatience, although therewas plenty to do in London for a man of intellect and taste; pictures, people, politics, all manner of interests and amusements.
Lisa had told him about the aunt who lived with her and kept house for her. There could be no impropriety in his visit. He made up his mind indeed to ask for the elder lady in the first instance; but all uncertainty was saved him, as it was la Zia who opened the door. Those diamonds of Lisa’s could not have been earned so speedily had the Venetians taken upon themselves the maintenance of a servant. What was she there for, argued la Zia—when Hawberk suggested the necessity of a parlour-maid—except to sweep and dust, and market and cook? An English servant, who would want butcher’s meat every day, and would object to the cuisineà l’huile, would be a ruinous institution.
La Zia was not too tidy in her indoor apparel, since her love for finery was stronger than her sense of the fitness of things. She had one gown at a time, a gown of silk or plush or velveteen, which she wore as a best gown till it began to be shabby or dilapidated, when Lisa bought her another fine gown, and the old one was taken for daily use.
Lisa’s taste had become somewhat chastened since she had lived at Chelsea. A casual word or two from Vansittart, whose lightest speech she remembered, had made her scrupulously plain in her attire—save on such an occasion as Mrs. Hawberk’s party, when her innate love of finery showed itself in scarlet stockings and beaded shoes. This afternoon Sefton found her sitting on the hearthrug in front of the bright little tiled grate, in the black stuff gown she had worn when he first saw her, and with just the same touch of colour at her throat, and in her blue-black hair.
She and the little boy were sitting on the rug together, dividing the caprices of a white kitten, the plaything of mother and son, mother and son laughing gaily, with laughter which harmonized and sounded like music. The boy made no change in his sprawling attitude as Sefton entered; but he looked up at the stranger with large dark eyes, wondering, and slightly resentful.
“Hisboy,” thought Sefton, and felt a malignant disposition to kick the sprawling imp, hanging on to the mother’s skirts, and preventing her from rising to greet her visitor.
“Let go, Paolo,” said Lisa, laughing. “What with you and the kitten, I can’t stir.”
She shook herself free, transferred the kitten to the boy’s eager arms, rose, and gave Sefton her hand, with a careless grace which was charming from an artistic point of view, but which showed him how faint an impression all his attentions of Sunday night had made upon her. A woman who had thought of him in the interval would have been startled at his coming. Lisa took his visit much too easily. There was neither surprise nor gladness in her greeting.
“I saw you in the stalls,” she said, “last night, and the night before. Aren’t you tired ofFanchonette?”
“Not in the least.”
“You must be monstrously fond of music,” she said, always in Italian.
“I am—monstrously; but I have other reasons for likingFanchonette. I like to see you act, as well as to hear you sing.”
“So do other people,” she answered, with frank vanity, tossing up her head. “They all applaud me when I first come on, before I have sung a note. I have to stand there in front of the lights for ever so long, while they go on applauding like mad. And yet people say you English have no enthusiasm, that you care very little for anything.”
“We care a great deal for that which is really beautiful; most of all when it is fresh and new.”
“Ah! that’s what Mr. Hawberk says—I am all the better because I am not highly trained like other singers. My ignorance is my strength.”
“But she has worked,” interposed la Zia; “ah! how hard she has worked! At her piano; at the English language. She has such a strong will. She has but to make up her mind, and the thing is done.”
“One can read as much, Signora, in those flashing eyes; in that square brow and firmly moulded chin,” said Sefton, putting down his hat and cane, and establishing himself in one of the prettily draped basket-chairs. “And pray how did it happen that you two ladies made up your minds to seek your fortunes in London?”
“It was the impresario who brought us. We were at Milan, and we came to London to sing in the chorus at Covent Garden. It was good fortune which brought us so far from home.”
“And you hate London, no doubt, after Italy?”
“No, indeed, Signor. London is a city to love—the wide, wide streets; the big, big houses; the great squares—ah! the Piazza is nothing to your square of Trafalgar—and the shops, the beautiful shops! Your sky is often gloomy, but there are summer days—heavenly days—when the wind blows down to the sea, and sweeps all the darkness out of the heavens, and your sky grows blue, like Italy. Those are days to remember.”
“True! They are rare enough to be counted on the fingers of one hand,” answered Sefton, stooping to take hold of the boy, who had been pursuing his kitten on all-fours, and had this moment plunged between Sefton’s legs to extract the animated ball of white fluff from under his chair. He felt nothing but aversion for the handsome, dark-eyed brat; but he felt that he must take some notice of the creature, if he wanted to stand well with the mother.
“Che sta facendo, padroncino?”
The boy was friendly, and explained himself in a torrent of broken speech. The cat was a bad cat, and wouldn’t stay with him. Would the Signor make him stay? Sefton had to stoop and risk a scratching from the tiny claws, in a vain endeavour to get hold of the rebellious beast, which rolled away from him, hissing and spitting, and finally scampered across the room and took refuge behind the piano. Sefton lifted the boy on to his knee, and produced his watch, that unfailing object of interest to infancy, usually denominated, on the principle of all slang nomenclature, “tick-tick.” Once interested in the opening and shutting of the “tick-tick,” Paolo sat on the visitor’s knee,comme un image, and allowed Sefton to talk to Lisa and her aunt.
He was careful to make himself agreeable to the elder lady, who was charmed to find an Englishman who understood her native tongue. She had contrived to learn a little English, but had made no such progress as her niece, and it was a labour to her to talk. What a pleasure, therefore, to find this suave, handsome Englishman, with his courtly manners, quick comprehension, and ready replies.
From la Zia he heard a good deal about Lisa’s early life; yet there was a certain wise reticence even on that loquacious lady’s part. She breathed no word of Lisa’s Englishman, the first Mr. Smith, or of the second. In all her talk of their old life, in Venice, at Milan, there was no hint of any one but themselves. They appeared to have been alone, unprotected, dependent on their own small earnings.
After waiting in vain for any allusion to Vansittart, Sefton came straight to the point, with a direct question.
“I think you know a friend of mine, Signora,” he said to Lisa. “Mr. Vansittart?”
“Vansittart?”
Lisa repeated the name slowly, with a look of blank wonder.
“Have you never heard that name before?”
“Never.”
“So,” thought Sefton, “she knew him under an alias. That means a good deal, and confirms my original idea.”
He put the boy off his knee almost roughly, and rose to depart.
“Good-bye, Signora. You will let me call in again some day, I hope?”
“If you like. Why did you think I knew your friend, Mr. Van—sit—tart?”
“Because last May I saw you in Cheyne Walk talking to a man whom I took for Vansittart. A tall man, with fair hair. You seemed very friendly with him; your hands were clasped upon his arm: you were smiling up at him.”
This time Lisa blushed a deep carnation, and her face saddened.
“Oh, that,” she stammered—“that was some one I knew in Italy.”
“Not Vansittart?”
“No.”
“But the gentleman has a name of some kind,” persisted Sefton.
“Never mind his name,” she answered abruptly. “I don’t want to talk about him. I may never see him again, perhaps.” And then, brushing away a tear, and becoming suddenly frivolous, she asked, “How did you come to remember me—after so long?”
“Because that moment by the river yonder has lived in my memory ever since—because no man can forget the loveliest face he ever saw in his life.”
With that compliment, and with a lingering clasp of the strong hand, he concluded his first visit to Saltero’s Mansion, la Zia accompanying him to the door and curtsying him out.