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 businesslike to permit any risk of the singer’s nonappearance. 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 lagoons—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’s naivete, finding a delicious originality in all her remarks upon life and the world she lived in, her stories of greenroom 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 lowborn; 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 yellow ones 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 seashell. 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
