He released her with those last words, and they stood looking at each other, she breathless with surprise.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked.
“Really, really, really. Say yes, Lisa. Kiss me, my beloved, kiss me the kiss of betrothal”—holding out his arms to her pleadingly. “We can be married two or three days hence, before the registrar, and afterwards in any church you like. You will throw up your engagement at once. We will go to the Tyrol, bury ourselves in the hills and the woods, and in November I will take you home, and let all the county envy me my lovely wife.”
“You would marry me—me, the lace-girl of Burano; common, oh, so common! And so poor; brought up among ragged children, earning seven soldi a day, living on polenta. You would marry Paolo’s mother?”
“Yes, I would marry Paolo’s mother, without even knowing the secret of Paolo’s parentage. I would marry you because I love you, Lisa—madly, foolishly, obstinately, with a love that does not count the cost.”
“And I should be a great lady? I should drive about in a grand carriage, and have footmen—powdered footmen like Lady Hartley’s—to wait upon me?”
“Yes, child, yes—frivolous, foolish child. Come! Come to my heart, Lisa! Non posso stare senza te!”
He would have taken her to his heart triumphantly, believing himself accepted; but she stretched out her two hands with a repelling gesture as he approached her, and held him at arm’s length.
“Not if you could make me a queen,” she said. “You do not know Fiordelisa, when you try to tempt her with house and land. Your English ladies marry like that, I have heard, for houses and jewels and horses, to be called Principessa or Contessa—but I will never belong to a man I don’t love. I have belonged to one man, and he was a hard master, and I felt like a slave with a chain. My life was not my own. I know what it is to belong to a man. It doesn’t mean paradise. But I loved him dearly at the first, when he was kind to me, and took me away from work and poverty. I loved him a little to the last even, though he was a hard master.”
“I would never be hard with you, Lisa. I could never be your master. Love has made me your slave. Carissima mia, be not so foolish as to deny me. Think how gay, how luxurious, how happy your life may be.”
He was pleading to her in her own dulcet language, the soft Italian, softened to even more liquid utterance by those elisions he had caught from her Venetian tongue.
She stood a few paces from him, her arms folded tightly across her breast, defying him. Marco, the cat, had awakened from his long afternoon sleep in a luxurious basket—Sefton’s offering—and was arching his back and rubbing his soft white fur against his mistress’s black gown. She looked like a witch, Sefton thought, standing there in her defiant beauty, shabbily clad in rusty black, and with the white cat protecting her, glaring and spitting at him in unreasoning anger.
“My life could never be happy with a man I did not love,” she said resolutely. “Even if I believed in your promises I would not marry you. I would not accept your generous sacrifice. But I don’t believe in your grand offers. I have been warned. I know your character better than you think. You are trying to deceive me with promises that you don’t mean to keep, as you deceived the farmer’s daughter, who drowned herself because of your lies.”
“Ah!” he cried furiously. “You have heard that village slander. It could only reach you from one source—the lips of the man who left you just now. Don’t you know that when a poor man’s daughter goes wrong it is always the richest man in the neighbourhood who is accused of seducing her? I dare say that rule holds good in Italy as well as in England. I am in earnest, Lisa. I mean no less than I say. Meet me next Monday at the registrar’s office, with your aunt, and with Signor Zinco if you like, to see that the marriage is a good marriage, and we will leave that office as man and wife.”
“No,” she answered doggedly. “Even if you are in earnest it can make no difference to me. I don’t want to be a great lady. People would laugh at me, and I should be miserable. You wouldn’t like la Zia to live in your fine house, would you now?”
“We could make her happy in a house of her own, or send her back to Venice with a comfortable income.”
“Just so. You would want to get rid of la Zia. That would not do for me. She and I have never been parted. And Paolo;
