He was dining one evening en petit comité with an old college chum and his young wife; the husband a rising barrister; the wife an accomplished woman, and a marvellous manager, able to maintain a pretty little house in Mayfair on an income which a stupid woman would have found hardly enough for Notting Hill or Putney, and to give an appetizing dinner, daintily served, and unhackneyed as to menu, for the cost of the average housekeeper’s leg of mutton and trimmings.
While the cheery little meal was being discussed, a servant brought in a coroneted envelope for the hostess, which being opened, contained a box for Covent Garden, where there was an early season of Italian Opera.
“For tonight,” said Mrs. Pembroke. And then she read aloud from the letter, “ ‘I find at the last moment that I can’t use my box. Do go if you are free. The opera is Faust, with a new “Margherita.” ’ That’s rather a pity,” sighed the lady, folding up the letter.
“Why a pity?” asked Vansittart. “Why shouldn’t you go? I dare say your box will hold me as well as Tom, so you need have no conscientious scruples on the ground of inhospitality.”
“Oh, there will be plenty of room. It is Lady Davenant’s box, on the grand tier. But Tom asked you for a quiet evening, a long talk and smoke, and perhaps an adjournment to the Turf for a rubber. I’m afraid you’ll be dreadfully bored if I take you to the opera instead.”
“Pray don’t think so badly of me. If it were Wagner perhaps I might be less sure of myself. There are bits I enjoy in his operas, but I confess myself a tyro in that advanced school. Gounod’s Faust I adore. We shall be in time for the Kermess scene, and the new Gretchen. Pray let us be off.”
A cab was sent for, and the trio packed themselves into it, Mrs. Pembroke sparkling with pleasure. She was passionately fond of music, and she had been looking forward to a solitary evening by the drawing-room fire, while her husband and his friend sat smoking and prosing together in the barrister’s ground-floor den.
The house was thin, this premature opera season not having been a marked success. Lady Davenant’s box was near the proscenium, a spacious box, which would have accommodated six people as easily as three. Vansittart sat in the middle, between his host and hostess. Tom Pembroke, who was no music lover, dozed in the shadow of the curtain, agreeably lulled by melodies which were pleasant from their familiarity.
The cast was not strong, but the Margherita was very young, rather pretty, and sang well. Vansittart and Mrs. Pembroke were both interested.
It was near the close of the Kermess scene that the lady asked her companion, “Do you ever look at the chorus? Such poor old things, some of them! I can’t help thinking how weary they must be of singing the same music season after season, and tramping in and out of the same scenes—banquets where there is nothing to eat, too, and then going home to bread and cheese.”
“Yes, it must be a hard life,” assented Vansittart; “all the trouble of the show, and none of the glory.”
And then he took a sweeping survey of the gay crowd, peasants, soldiers, citizens, feasting and rejoicing in friendly German fashion under the open sky. Yes, Mrs. Pembroke was right; most of the chorus were middle-aged, some were elderly—withered old faces, dark skins which even bismuth could not transform to fairness. Italian eyes, dark and glowing, shone out of worn faces where all other beauty was lacking.
Suddenly among all those homely countenances he saw a young face, young and beautiful, a face that flashed upon him first with a rapid thrill of recognition, and then with an aspect that struck into his heart like a dagger, and when that sharp pang was over left a heaviness as of lead.
It was Fiordelisa’s face. He could not be mistaken. Nay, the fact was made certainty as he looked, for he saw that the girl recognized him. She was gazing upward to the spot where he sat; she was talking about him to the woman who stood next her, indicating him with too expressive gesticulation.
Was she telling that stolid listener that the man yonder had slain his fellow-creature in a tavern row; that he was a murderer? She would put it so, no doubt—she whose lover he had killed.
If she were saying this the stolid woman received the statement very placidly. She only nodded, and shrugged her shoulders, and then nodded again, while Fiordelisa talked to her more and more excitedly, with dramatic emphasis. Surely no woman would stand and shrug and nod as this woman shrugged and nodded, at a tale of murder.
Then Lisa looked up again at him, beaming with smiles, her dark eyes sparkling in the gaslight; and then her turn came to swell the chorus; and then the curtain fell, and he saw her no more.
It was as much as he could do to get through the interval before that curtain rose again. Tom Pembroke wanted him to go out for a stroll in the foyer, for a drink of some kind. “I would rather stay with Mrs. Pembroke,” he said, full of wild surmises, prepared for a mysterious knock at the box door, and the appearance of a policeman from over the way to take him in custody at Lisa’s instigation; prepared for anything tragic that might happen to him. What might not happen when the hot-blooded Southern nature was in question? What bounds would there be for the revengeful passion of such a girl as Fiordelisa, who had been
