CHAPTER XXII.
“SO VERY WILFUL.”
Another Easter over, another season beginning, and with all the usual auguries of a season of exceptional splendour—auguries to be exchanged later for dismal elegies upon a season of surpassing dulness and stagnation, which had disappointed everybody, and all but ruined the West End tradesmen. As this jubilant vaticination and these melancholy wailings are repeated year after year, they have come to be of little more significance than the chirping of the newly arriving swifts under the eaves, or the twittering of the swallows assembled for their autumnal flight. Seasons come and seasons go. People are hopeful before the fact, and disappointed after the fact; the great chorus of humanity goes on. Such is life. A season of hope and disillusion. Contemplate existence from the severest standpoint of the agnostic metaphysician, or from the most exalted platform of the Christian saint, and the ultimate fact is the same. We begin in hope to end in sorrow.
For Signora Vivanti the after-Easter season began under cheeriest conditions. Her success at the Apollo had been unbroken. The longer she acted a part, the more spirited her acting became. Ignorant and uncultured as she was, she possessed the gift of “gag,” knew when and where to introduce a word or a look which delighted her audience; and the management and her brother and sister artists—more especially the brothers—gave her full scope. These little inspirations of hers became licensed liberties, and herrôlegrew and strengthened under her hands. She was the most popular actress who had appeared at the Apollo since the building of the theatre.
So at Easter the impresario increased the lady’s salary for the fourth time since herdébut. He knew what tempting offers had been made to her by managers and by agents—how eager one was to send her to America, what dazzling lures another held out for Australasia. Happily, la Vivanti liked London—big, dirty, bustling London—and was content to make her fortune within the sound of Big Ben, whose mighty voice came booming along the tide to Chelsea when the wind blew from the Essex marshes and the German Ocean.
Lisa was making her fortune as fast as a young woman of moderate desires could wish to make it. To herself she appeared inordinately rich. The collet necklace had now a fine half-hoop bracelet to keep it company in the strong box under Lisa’s bed, and she had a number of brooches which studded her corsage like a constellation. What the outside world said of Lisa’s diamonds was very different from the truth; but the Venetian neither knew nor cared what the outside world was saying. The people in the theatre were all very kind to her. They knew that she was what Mr. Hawberk called “straight,” and that the gems she flashed upon the public eye were honestly come by, the result of an economical existence. She and la Zia were able to live upon so little. A few shreds of meat, messed up in some occult manner with their perpetual pasta, sufficed for dinner. A breakfast of coffee and rolls; a supper of highly odorous cheese, with sometimes for a festa a dish of cheap pastry from the Swiss confectioner’s in the King’s Road. Such a cuisine did not make much impression upon Signora Vivanti’s salary. She had no servant, except a slovenly female, with depressing manners, who came two mornings a week to scrub floors, clean windows, and black-lead grates. La Zia did all the rest, and delighted in her work. To sweep and dust those palatial apartments was a perpetual joy to her, second only to the delight of tramping up and down the King’s Road, exploring every greengrocer’s shop till she secured the cheapest vegetables, and lamenting the Rialto, where three lemons could be had for two soldi, and where the pale, bloodless asparagus was less than a quarter the London price of that luxury. Pleasant also was it to la Zia to take the ’bus for Coventry Street, and to prowl about the foreign settlement between the churches of St. Anne and St. Giles; but oh, what a dull and dismal aspect had the restaurants andtable d’hôtesin this quarter, as compared with theCappello Nero and the movement and brightness of the Piazza.
La Zia was happy, but in spite of an altogether phenomenal success, and of wealth that far surpassed her dreams of fortune, the same could not be said of Fiordelisa. There was that lacking in her young life which changed her gold to dross, her laurels to worthless weeds. She had loved, and loved passionately, with all theforce of her undisciplined heart, and her love had been rejected. She had steeped her soul in the promise of bliss, had told herself again and again that the kindnesses she received from the man she loved could only be given by a lover. Her notion of ethics was not exalted enough to comprehend Vansittart’s desire to atone for a great wrong, or to understand that so much gentleness and generosity could be lavished upon her by any one less than a lover. She had built her soul a palace—not of art, but of love—and when the unreal fabric fell her disappointment had been as crushing as it was unforeseen.
After that passionate scene with Vansittart Lisa gave herself up to the luxury of grief. For days she would hardly eat enough to sustain life; for many nights she tossed sleepless on her bed, sobbing over her vanished hopes, as an undisciplined child weeps for the loss of a promised pleasure. It was only good little Tomaso Zinco’s strenuous arguments which ultimately brought her to reason. La Zia could do nothing with her. She turned her face to the wall, like David, and her long blue-black hair was tangled with tossing on her pillow, and wet with her passionate tears. She would not get up, or put on her clothes, or even wash her face. It was her way of scattering ashes on her head, and rending her garments. Her grief had all the fervid unreasonableness of Oriental mourning.
La Zia was obliged to take the ’cello player into the bedroom, and show him this spectacle of angry despair.
“He has deserted her—the father of her child,” muttered Zinco, in the vestibule, as la Zia tried to explain the situation. “That is bad, bad, bad. Very bad.”
“No, no,” said la Zia, shaking her head vehemently; “it is not that. He has done no wrong. He has paid for her lessons, paid her rent, he has done much for us. Only she loved him, and he did not love her. She is like a child. She will not be consoled.”
Zinco nodded a vague assent, but did not believe the good aunt’s assurance. Of course this man was the father of her child. Of course she had been his mistress. He had brought her from Venice, and established her in these comfortable lodgings, and now he was tired of her. These things always end so. “Chi va all’acqua si bagna, e chi va a cavallo cade.”
The good little Zinco crept into the room as softly as a cat, and seated his stout and oily person by the bed, where Lisa was lying face downwards, her tearful countenance buried in the pillow, and nothing but a mass of tangled black hair visible above the gaudy Mexican blanket. He gently patted her shoulder, which acknowledged the attention with an angry shrug.
“Come, come, cara mia,” pleaded the singing-master. “Is not this a mere childishness, to cry for the moon, when we have goodfortune almost at our feet? To cry because just one foolish young man among all the men in the world is not wise enough to know that there is no more beautiful woman than us in London! And not to eat, and not to sleep, and to cry and sob all day and night. Ahimé, che bestia! This is just the very way to lose our voice, to become mute as one of those nightingales whose tongues were cut out to flavour the pasta for Vitellius. Was there ever such foolishness? Were I a beautiful girl with a fine voice, I would be queen of the world. If he has been cold and cruel show him what a pearl he has lost. It is not by lying here and crying that you will bring him to reason. Get up and dress yourself, and come to the piano. I’ll wager you will not be able to take the upper C in ‘Roberto.’”
Lisa listened in sullen silence, but she did listen, and it seemed to her that the words of Zinco were the words of wisdom. To lose her voice—her voice which was her fortune—and to lose her good looks, which alone had lifted her from the herd of peasants, living in penury, toiling from sunrise to sunset, unknown and ill-clad, and dying uncared for, save by creatures as poor and as hopeless as themselves! Yes, Zinco was right; that would indeed be foolishness, and not the way to win him whose love her sick soul longed for. Perhaps if she were a public singer, and all the world admired her, he would admire her too. He would see in the eyes of other men that she was handsome, and worthy to be admired. He would hear on the lips of other men that she was worthy of praise.
“I’ll get up,” she said, without lifting her tear-stained face from the pillow. “Go into the sala and wait for me. I won’t be long. You shall see I haven’t lost my voice.”
“Bene, benissimo, Si’ora,” cried the master, rubbing his fat little hands, “now she speaks like a woman of spirit. She is not going to give up the world for love, like Marc Antony at Actium.”
He shuffled off to the sitting-room, seated himself at the piano, and began to play the symphony of “Una Voce” with that grandly decisive style of a man who has played all his life in an orchestra. It was a refreshment to Lisa’s weary spirit to hear that sparkling music, light, gay, capricious as summer wavelets.
She joined her teacher at the piano in a much shorter time than a young Englishwoman would have needed to complete her toilet, yet she looked fresh enough in her southern beauty, and there were glittering water-drops in her hair which gave a suggestion of a young river goddess.
“Now, then, sir, play ‘Roberto’ and you will see if my voice is broken.”
She attacked the scena with wonderful dash and spirit, and was, in sporting phraseology, winning easily till she came to that C inalt—but here her voice snapped. She tried a second time, and a third time—but the note was gone. She gave a cry of rage, and then burst into tears.
“Ecco,” exclaimed Zinco, with a triumphant air, “that is what your love-sick nonsense has done for you. You have been singing as false as a prima donna at acafé chantantin the Boulevard St. Michel, and your upper C is gone. It would have been worth £40 a week to you, but you have thrown it away.”
At this; Lisa continued her lamentation, deeply sorry for herself.
“There’s no use in crying,” said Zinco; “that only makes things worse. Bisogna sempre aver pazienza in questo mondo. You had better dry your tears and eat a beefsteak—bleeding—and drink a pint of port-beer. Malibran used to drink port-beer. In one of her great scenes she had her quart pot on the stage, hidden behind a set piece—a rock, or what not—and after her cavatina she would fall on the stage as if fainting, and drag herself to the back of the rock and drink; ah, how she would drink!”
“I don’t want to lose my voice,” sobbed Lisa, to whom Malibran was but an empty name.
“No. Yet you go just the right way to lose it. Come, cheer up, Si’ora. Eat much steaks, drink much stout, for the next three days. Andiamo adagio. Don’t sing a note till I come next Saturday afternoon to give you your lesson.”
Zinco’s policy prevailed. Lisa fretted sorely at the thought of losing that voice which was to be her fortune. She had told herself in her despair that fame and fortune would be useless without the man she loved—that she had only wished to succeed as a singer in order to please him. And now she began to see the situation in a new light. She wanted to be admired and famous like the singers whom she had seen at Covent Garden, curtsying behind a pile of bouquets, while the house resounded with applause. She wanted to be applauded like those famous singers, so that the cruel Smith might see her, and be sorry that he had refused her his heart. Who could tell? Perhaps seeing her so admired, hearing her voice ring clear and sweet through the theatre, he might abandon his tuneless English sweetheart, and come back to Lisa, come back as lover, as husband. Zinco had told her that a fashionable prima donna could not look too high. She would have all London at her feet. It would be for her to choose.
Lisa had a strong will, and a wonderful power of self-command when she really wanted to command herself; so she dried her tears, ate British beef, almost raw, and drank British stout; and under this régime her nerves speedily recovered from the rude shaking which passion had given them, and when the good little ’cello player came to give her the Saturday lesson, her voice rang outsound as a bell, and B natural was produced with perfect ease—a round and perfect note.
“We’ll wait till next Tuesday for the C,” said Zinco, “and we won’t try ‘Roberto’ for a week or so. Stick to the Solfeggi.”
“And I have not lost my voice, caro?”
“No more than I have lost a thousand pounds, poveretta.”
After this things went smoothly. Life seemed very dreary to Fiordelisa without the friend whose rare visits had been her delight; but her mind was braced and fortified by a steady purpose. She meant to win the great British public; and behind that indefinite monster there shone the image of the man she loved. He would go to the theatre where she sang. He would see her, and understand at last that she was beautiful and gifted, and worthy to be loved.
“And then he knows that I love him with all the strength of my heart,” she said to herself. “That ought to count for something. Yet when I told him of my love he shrank from me, as if he hated me for loving him. That is his cold English nature, perhaps. An Englishman does not like unasked love.”
Lisa was two years older than in that day of despair, and Zinco’s promises had been realized. She had the town at her feet; and if the coronet matrimonial had not yet been laid there she had received plenty of that adulation and of those advances which cannot be accepted without peril. All such advances Lisa had repulsed with a splendid scorn. Carriages, servants, West End apartments, and St. John’s Wood villas had been offered her; but she still rode in penny omnibuses or twopenny steamers, or trudged valiantly in cheap shoes. She might have had an open account with any silk mercer in London. She might have had her frocks made by the dressmaker on the crest of fashion’s changeful wave—but she was content to wear a black stuff gown, with a bit of bright ribbon tied round her neck, and another bit twisted in her hair. When she wanted to look her best she put on her bead necklace—one of those necklaces which the man she loved bought for her in the Procuratie Vecchie on that fatal night. The idea that he had bought the murderous dagger at the same shop in no wise lessened her pleasure in these gifts of his.
Among her numerous admirers one only had been received by the lady and her aunt, and that was Wilfred Sefton, who had contrived to establish a footing in the Signora’s drawing-room before Zinco could protest against his admission. He had so managed as to be regarded as a friend by both aunt and niece, and the boy, whom he detested, had grown odiously fond of him. He had known Lisa for a year and a half, had seen her often, had spent long summer days in her company, and in all that time he had never addressed her asa lover. He knew, too well, from many a subtle sign and token, that his going or coming affected her not at all; that she liked him and welcomed him only because his presence and his attentions made a pleasant variety in the dulness of her domestic life. He knew this. He knew that whatever she might have been in the past, she was a virtuous woman in the present, that she courted no man’s admiration, and was tempted by no man’s gold. Convinced of this, finding her as remote in her quiet indifference as if she had been some young patrician pacing her ancestral park in maiden meditation, fancy free, his desire to win her intensified until she seemed to him the only woman in the world worth winning. Had she been easily won he might have been tired of her before now. His grandes passions in the past had been of short duration. Unspeakable weariness had descended upon him as a blight; the loathing of life and all it could yield him. Lisa’s indifference gave a piquancy to their relations. He told himself that he could afford to bide his time. He had done a good deal of mischief in the world; but he was not a vulgar profligate. His love was an unscrupulous but not a vulgar love.
The white kitten, a thoroughbred Persian, and a gift from Mrs. Hawberk, had grown into a great white cat, stolid, beautiful, resentful of strange caresses, but devotedly attached to Lisa and her boy. He was called Marco, after the patron saint of Venice; and he looked like the white cat of fairy tale, who might be transformed at any moment into Prince Charming.
By the time Marco had grown up Mr. Sefton had made himself accepted as a trusted and familiar friend, and in this season of ripening spring, when the lilacs and laburnums filled the suburban gardens with perfume and colour, and when the hawthorn bushes were beginning to break into clusters of scented blossom here and there, it was his business and his pleasure to afford some glimpses of a fairer world to the little family at Chelsea.
The holiday which Fiordelisa and her belongings most enjoyed was a day on the river. They would have taken boat at Chelsea, if Sefton had allowed them, and would have been content to be rowed to Hammersmith Bridge; but he insisted on introducing them to Father Thames under a fairer aspect; so they usually took the train to Richmond, and from Richmond Bridge Sefton rowed them to Kingston or Hampton, where they lunched at some quiet inn, and sat in some rustic inn garden, or sauntered in those lovely old Palace gardens by the river, till it was time to go back to the boat and the train. Sefton was too punctual and business-like to permit any risk of the singer’s non-appearance. He took care that Lisa should always be at the Apollo in time for her work.
These days were very delightful to him, even in spite of Paolo, whose attentions were sometimes boring. Happily, Paolo loved the water with an instinctive hereditary passion, the instinct of amphibious ancestors, born and bred on a level with the lagunes—reared half on sea and half on land. It was amusement enough for him to sit in the stern of the skiff and dabble a bare arm in the stream, or to watch the little paper boats which la Zia made for him, or the great white swans which hissed menaces at him with horizontal necks as they paddled slowly by, sacrificing grace and stateliness to unreasoning anger. Sefton put up with Paolo, and was happy in the society of two ignorant women, delighting in Lisa’snaïveté, finding a delicious originality in all her remarks upon life and the world she lived in, her stories of green-room quarrels and side-scene flirtations. Talk which might have sounded silly and vulgar in English was fascinating in Italian—all the more fascinating in that Venetian dialect which so languidly slurred the syllables, lazily dropping the consonants, and which had in its soft elisions something childlike that touched Sefton’s fancy. He took pleasure in Lisa’s talk almost as if she had been a child, while those sudden flashes of shrewdness, natural to the peasant of all countries, assured him that she was no fool.
He thought of Emma Hamilton, and wondered whether the charm which held Nelson till the hour of death, and made his Emma the last thought when life grew dim, were some such childlike spontaneous charm as this of Lisa’s, the charm of unsophisticated womanhood, adapted to no universal pattern, cut and polished in no social diamond-mill.
Yes, she had charmed him in their first interview, sitting out in the chilly tent, amidst the glimmer of fairy lamps. She charmed him still, after a year and a half of familiar friendship. She, the ignorant and low-born; he, the modern worldling, who had touched the highest culture at every point, strained his intellect to reach every goal, measured himself against every theory of life here and hereafter, and found happiness nowhere. She pleased him all the more because she was not a lady, and made none of the demands which the modern lady makes over-strenuously—the demand to be treated as a boon companion and yet worshipped as a goddess; the demand of your money, your mind, your time, your wit, your trouble. Lisa had no idea of women’s rights, and she was grateful for the simplest festa which her admirer offered her. Never had a grande passion cost him so little. This girl, who had worked in the lace factory at Burano for a few pence per day, and had lived mostly on polenta, sternly refused anything in the shape of a gift, even to a bunch of flowers, if she thought they were costly.
“I like the cheap flowers best,” she said, “the blue and yellowones that they sell in the streets, or the great red poppies la Zia buys, which flame in the fireplace, ever so much brighter than a real fire.”
Often, in a casual way, he had tried to make her talk of Vansittart, but in vain. She would say nothing about him, yet she was curious to know all that Sefton could tell her about the man with whom he had seen her talking. Sefton took his revenge by a studious reticence.
“Yes, I know the man,” he said, when the subject was mooted in the early days of their acquaintance.
“Do you know him intimately? Is he your friend?”
“No.”
“You look and speak as if you did not like him.”
“I look and speak as I feel.”
“Why don’t you like him?” urged Lisa.
“Who knows? We all have our likings and our antipathies.”
“But if he has never injured you——”
“That is a negative merit. I dislike a good many people who have never done me any harm.”
“He is going to be married, I hear.”
“He is married. He was married last summer.”
“Do you know his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Not so beautiful as you; but she has a complexion like the inside of a sea-shell. You know those pale shells, almost transparent, with a rosy flush that is less a colour than a light. She has pale gold hair, which shines round her low, broad forehead like a nimbus in one of Fra Angelica’s pictures of Virgins and angels. She is rather like an old Italian picture, of that early school which chose a golden-haired ideal and left your glowing Southern beauty out in the cold. She is not so handsome as you,bellissima.”
“Yet he liked her better than he liked me. What is the good of my being handsome? He did not care,” said Lisa, passionately.
It was the first time she had betrayed herself to Sefton. He smiled, and glanced from the mother’s angry face to the boy, who was hanging about her knee, unconsciously reproducing the attitude of many an infant St. John.
“Yes, there can be no doubt,” he told himself, “Vansittart is the man she loved, and this brat must be Vansittart’s offspring.”
Lady Hartley had told him that her brother had been a rambler in Italy and the Tyrol for years before her marriage.