There were flowers in the balcony, a bed of marigolds, a flower which la Zia had discovered to be decorative and cheap. For perfume there were stocks and mignonette. The balcony was wide enough to hold plenty of flowers, and a couple of basket chairs in which Lisa and her aunt sat for many idle hours in fine weather, breathing the cool breezes from the river, and submitting to the blacks. They thought of their attic window in the Campo, and the life and movement in the paved square below, the passing and repassing of the lighthearted crowd to and fro on the Rialto, the twanging of a guitar now and then, the tinkling of wiry mandolines, the nasal tones of a street-singer. Here they had a wider horizon, but a murkier sky, and not that concentration of gaiety which makes every campo in Venice a busy little world, self-contained and self-sufficing. Eve looked round the room, noting the pretty furniture, obviously chosen by a person of taste; the open piano; the glimpse of a somewhat untidy bedroom through a door ajar. Her husband had chosen the furniture, Eve told herself. He had built this nest for his singing-bird.
“I am looking at your rooms,” she said, with pale lips; “the rooms my husband furnished for you.”
Lisa had not even the grace to attempt a denial.
“He was very good, very generous,” she faltered, her eyes suffused with tears, those tears which came so readily to Lisa’s eyes, on the stage or off. “There never was anyone so good as he.”
“He owed you at least as much as that,” said Eve, sternly. “It was the least he could do.”
“Ah, he has told you then,” cried Lisa, eagerly; “he has told you his secret.”
“No, he has not told me. He was too much ashamed to tell me of anything so infamous. He is not shameless like you,” said Eve, trembling with indignant feeling.
It was all true then, all that Sefton had told her sister; all that her own jealous fears had suggested. This woman stood before her, unabashed, ready to expatiate upon her sin.
“He has told me nothing,” she said, “or if he has spoken of you it has only been to deceive me. But there are some things that are easy to guess, when a woman has lived in the world as I have, and has heard other women talk. Two years ago perhaps I might have been fooled by his falsehoods; but I am wiser now. I knew from the first that you had been his mistress; that he was the father of that boy.”
She pointed to the unconscious Paolo, sprawling on the floor, turning the leaves of a picture-book, and doing his utmost to destroy an indestructible “Jack the Giant Killer,” printed on stout linen.
“You knew what was not true, then,” said Lisa, drawing herself up, with crimson cheeks and flaming eyes. “You pretend to know that which is false, false, una bugia indegna. He was never anything to me but a friend, my generous and noble friend. He hired this apartment for us, for la Zia and me, and he furnished these rooms, and he bought me that piano, and he paid the good Zinco to teach me to sing. E vero! I owe him my fortune, and all I have in the world. I would walk barefoot all over this earth if I could make him happier by my toil. There is nothing in this world I would not do for him.”
“And you ask me to believe that he did all this for friendship—mere friendship—he, an English gentleman, for an Italian peasant?”
“I don’t ask you to believe anything, and I don’t care what you believe. He is all the world to me. You are nothing—less than nothing!” cried Lisa, passionately. “I hate you. If it had not been for you he would have married me, perhaps. Who knows?”
“You think he would have married you! And yet he was only your friend, you say.”
“He was only my friend.”
“He brought you and your aunt from Italy and set you up in London; and yet he was only your friend.”
“He did not bring us from Italy. We came to London of our own accord. He was only my friend. He was never any more than my friend. If he had been I would not disown him. I love him too well to be ashamed.”
“You own that you love him?”
“Yes, I am not ashamed of my love. There are people somewhere who worship the sun. I am no more ashamed than they are. I told him of my love on my knees in this room, where you are sitting. I knelt at his feet and asked him to give me heart for heart. I thought then that he would hardly have been so kind unless he loved me. But he told me that he loved an English girl, and that she was to be his wife. There was no hope for me. I wanted to kill myself, but he stopped me with his strong arms. Yes, for just one moment I was in his arms! Only one moment, and then he flung me from him as if I were dirt.”
“He must have been very chivalrous to do so much for friendship,” said Eve, shaken, but not convinced.
The woman spoke with the accents of truth; but Eve remembered that she was an actress, trained in the art of simulated passion. No doubt it was easy for an actress to lie like truth.
“He wanted to help us,” protested Lisa; “he blamed himself so much for—”
She stopped, coloured, and then grew pale. It was evident to her now that Vansittart’s wife had been told nothing, and she, Lisa, had been on the point of betraying him.
“For what? Why did he blame himself?”
“Did I say ‘blame’? I use wrong words sometimes,”
