After the savoury dishes Fiordelisa began upon pastry, with an appetite as of a giant refreshed. She rested her elbow on the table, and the loose sleeve of her velveteen gown rolled back and showed the round white arm. All the little crinkly curls danced upon her pure white forehead and over her dancing eyes as she ate chocolate éclairs and creamy choux to her heart’s content, while Vansittart thought what a pretty creature she was, and what a pity Mr. Burgess or Mr. Logsdaile was not there with palette and brushes, to fix that gay and brilliant image upon canvas forever.
Vansittart was not in love with this chance acquaintance of an idle afternoon. He was only delighted with her. She amused, she fascinated him, just as he was amused and fascinated by this enchanting city of Venice, which had always the same charm and the same glamour for him, come here at what season he might. She impressed him with a sense of her beauty, just as one of those wonderful pictures in the Venetian Academy would have done.
His heart was unmoved by this sensuous, eager, earthly loveliness. Her vulgarity, all her words and gestures essentially of the people, interested him, yet kept him worlds away from her.
He was rich, idle, alone in Venice, and he thought it was his right to amuse himself to the uttermost at this Carnival season. That offer of a cup of coffee, arising out of mutual laughter at some absurdities among the crowd, had been the beginning of the friendliest relations.
He strolled on the loose, level sands with Lisa and her aunt, those sands over which Byron used to ride, the poet of whose existence Lisa had never heard, yet who had wasted lightest hours with just such girls as Lisa. And then how could he go back to Venice alone in his gondola and leave this black-eyed girl and her chaperon to struggle for standing room among the crowd on the twopenny steamer, in their fine clothes and jewels, those jewels in which lower-class Venetians love to invest their savings? No; it was the most natural thing in life to offer them seats in his gondola, and then to see the fun of the Grand Canal in their company; and what young man with his notecase plethoric with limp Italian notes, and a reserve of English banknotes in a close-buttoned inside pocket, could refrain from offering dinner, and then, hearing that Lisa was pining to go to the opera, a box at that entertainment? No sooner had she expressed her desire, while they were on the Grand Canal, than he sent off a Venetian guide, whom he knew of old, to engage a stage box for the evening.
Fiordelisa told him about her life at Burano, while she devoured her pastry, the aunt listening placidly, replete with dinner and wine, caring for nothing except that those old days were a thing of the past, and that neither she nor her handsome niece need toil or starve any more—not for the present, at any rate; perhaps never. La Zia was not a woman to peer curiously into the future while the present gave her a comfortable lodging and meat and drink.
The girl talked her Venetian, and Vansittart, who had spent most of his holidays in Italy, and had a quick ear for dialects, was able to understand her. Now and then she spoke English, better than he would have expected from her youthful ignorance.
“How is it that you can talk English, Signorina mia, and how is it that you left Burano?” he asked in Italian.
“For one and the same reason. A young English gentleman fell in love with me, and brought my aunt and me to Venice, and is having me educated, in order to marry me and take me to England with him.”
Vansittart did not believe in the latter half of the story, but he was too polite to express his doubt.
“Oh, you are being educated up to our idea of the British matron, are you, bella mia?” he said, smiling at her, as she wiped her coral lips with the coarse serviette, and flung herself back in her chair, satiated with cream and pastry. “And pray in what does the education consist?”
“I am learning to play on the mandoline. A little old man with a cracked voice comes to our lodgings twice a week to teach me—and we sing duets, ‘La ci darem’ and ‘Sul aria.’ ”
“The mandoline. Ah, that is your English friend’s notion of education,” said Vansittart, laughing. “Well, I dare say that it is as good as Greek or Latin, or the pure science that gave Giordano Bruno such a bad time in this very city.”
He leant back with his head in an angle of the wall, idle, amused, interested, taking life as it seemed to him life ought to be taken—very lightly.
He had been in Venice only a few days, days of sunshine and sauntering in gondolas to this or the other island, to dream away an
