He would have to marry some day, he knew. It was an obligation laid upon him together with the family seat and comfortable income to which he had succeeded before his two-and-twentieth birthday. The thing would have to be done—but he meant to delay the evil hour as long as he could, and to be monstrously exacting as to the fairy princess for whose dear sake he should put on those domestic fetters.
He had enjoyed this particular visit to Venice with a keener relish than either of his previous visits. Though the year was still young, the weather had been exceptionally lovely. Sun, moon, and stars had shed all that they have of glory and of glamour over the romantic city, painting the smooth lagoons with a rare splendour of colouring which changed city and sea into something supernal, unimaginable, dreamlike.
His windows at Danieli’s looked over an enchanted sea, where the great modern Peninsular and Oriental steamer moored between the Riva and St. George the Greater seemed an anachronism in iron. All else was fairy-like, historic, medieval.
The steamer was to sail for Alexandria in the afternoon, they had told him, whenever he made any inquiry about her; but the days and afternoons had gone, and she was still lying there, blocking out a little bit of the opposite island and the famous church.
“And so you sing as well as play, Fiordelisa?” he asked, presently, after a silence in which they all three smoked their cigarettes.
“Sing! I should think she did sing,” answered the aunt. “She warbles like a nightingale. Signor Zefferino, her master, says she ought to come out at the opera.”
Vansittart smiled. Idle flattery on the maestro’s part, no doubt; the flattery of the small parasite who knows where the macaroni is savouriest, and where the salad reeks with oil.
And yet, if this girl sang at all, she should sing sweetly. Those dark, sunny eyes of hers gave promise of the artistic temperament. The tones that came from that round, full throat, ivory white against the tawdry black and yellow of her gown, should be rich and ripe.
He asked no questions about her English lover. Had he been ever so little in love with her himself he would have been full of curiosity—but for this flower of a day, this beautiful stranger, with whom he ate and drank and made merry tonight, and whom he might never see again, he had no serious concern. He cared not who were her friends or followers; whether the life she lived were good or evil. She had a fresh youthfulness, a look of almost childlike innocence, in spite of her tousled hair and tawdry raiment, and although Signor Campi’s keen eye had condemned her. The aunt, too, fat, common, too fine for respectability, seemed a harmless old thing. No word of evil had come from her lips. She had not the air of laying snares for the stranger’s feet. She thought of nothing but the enjoyment of the moment.
“Pray, where may your Englishman be today?” asked Vansittart, as it flashed upon his idle mind that there might be peril in such a city as Venice in being seen with another man’s sweetheart. “Why didn’t he escort you to the Lido?”
“He went to Monte Carlo a fortnight ago,” she answered. “I am afraid he is a gambler.”
“Is he rich?”
“No, not as you English count riches. He is rich for a Venetian. He gave la Zia and me our gowns—she chose red, I black—last Christmas. There are few Venetians who would give such handsome presents. He is very generous.”
“Yes, he is very generous,” echoed the aunt.
“It is time we went to the opera,” cried Fiordelisa. “I want to be there at the beginning.”
The opera was Don Giovanni; the artists were third-rate; but they sang well enough to lull la Zia into a comfortable slumber and to lift Lisa to the seventh heaven. She sat with clasped hands, listening in a rapture of content. She only unclasped her hands to applaud vehemently when the house applauded. The theatre was crowded, the audience were noisy, but Fiordelisa craned her long neck out of the box to listen, and drank in every note with those quick ears of hers, and was perhaps almost the only person in the Rossini Theatre that night who listened intently: but before the second act was over the crowd and the heat had increased to such a degree that women were fainting in the boxes, and even Fiordelisa was resigned to leaving before Don Giovanni was half done. She wanted to walk in the Piazza before the shops were shut, or the crowd began to thin, or the bands ceased playing.
There was to be a masked ball at the same theatre on the following night.
“Shall I take you to the ball, Lisa?” asked Vansittart, as they came out of the heat and the glare into the cool softness of a Venetian night.
“No, I don’t care about dancing. I only care for the opera. The girls at Burano were mad about dancing, but I liked to hear the
