“Call me Si’ora, if you won’t call me Lisa,” said the young woman, impetuously. “I won’t be called by that formal Frenchified Madame.”
“It shall be Si’ora, then, if that will content you. And now, Si’ora, and la Zia, tell me that you are satisfied with me, and that what I am glad to do for you will be in some sense an atonement for—what I did that night.”
Lisa burst into a flood of tears.
“You are too generous; you do too much,” she cried. “He would never have done so much, not even if he had been rich. He thought anything good enough for us—after, after he began to get tired of us. You are a hundred times better than he was—”
“Lisa, Lisa,” remonstrated the elder woman, “that is a hard thing to say.”
“Oh, I know; I loved him once—passionately, passionately. I prayed the Holy Mother every night and morning to make him keep his word and marry me. He gave me my velvet gown. Yes, I loved him passionately. He gave me lessons on the mandoline, and promised he would have me trained to be a lady. Yes, I loved him. I shall never forget the day he first came into the factory at Burano, and looked at us all as we sat at our work, and began to talk to me in Italian. There are so few Englishmen who can speak a single sentence of Italian, and his voice was so soft and kind, and he asked me questions about my work. But afterwards, when we were in Venice, he was not always kind; not as kind or as gentle as you are.”
She cried a little more after these simple utterances; and then she dried her tears, and la Zia comforted her, and they all three went downstairs and drove to the house-agent’s office, where Vansittart introduced Signora Vivanti, of the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, as a tenant for the third floor of Saltero’s Mansion, he himself, Mr. John Smith, vouching for the respectability of the ladies, and paying a year’s rent in advance with some banknotes he had ready for the transaction. This handsome payment, and the fact that the flat was unfurnished, reconciled the agent to the vagueness of a referee who only described himself as John Smith, of London.
This done, and the key of the third-floor flat having been handed over to him by the agent, Vansittart put Lisa and her aunt into the carriage and bade them goodbye.
“You will be driven back to Stone Court,” he said, “in plenty of time for your work at the theatre. I will see about furnishing the new rooms tomorrow, and everything ought to be ready for you in a week. You had better give your landlady a week’s notice.”
“She will be sorry to part with Paolo,” said la Zia. “She is as fond of him as if she were his grandmother.”
“You will come to see us in a week?” said Lisa, earnestly, as he shut the carriage door.
“In a week your new home will be ready,” he answered; “I will come or write. Goodbye.”
He waved his hand to the driver, whom he had instructed to take the ladies back to the entrance of Stone Court. The carriage moved off, Lisa looking at him earnestly, with something of a disappointed air, to the last.
“Poor child! Did she think I was going to give them a dinner at a restaurant, as I did that day in Venice?” he asked himself, as he walked towards Piccadilly. “What a curious, impulsive, infantine nature it is; made up of laughter and of tears; taking the ghastliest things lightly, and yet with the capacity for passion and grief. Well, it is a good thing, it is a happy thing for me to be able to mend the broken life, and to give happiness where I had brought misery.”
He devoted the best part of the following day to the business of furnishing. It was his first experience in that line since he had taken over his predecessor’s sticks at Balliol, adding such luxuries and artistic embellishments as his youthful fancy prompted. He had been interested then with the undergraduate’s pleasure in his emancipation from the Etonian’s dependence. He was interested now. He felt as if he had been furnishing a doll’s house for the occupation of a talking doll, so childishly simple did Lisa’s intellect seem to him. He took a pleasure in the task, and exercised taste and common sense in every detail.
The rooms were furnished in less than a week, for the furniture was of the simplest, and all ready to his hand at a West End upholsterer’s. He had but to make his selection from a variety of styles, all graceful, artistic, and inexpensive. At the end of the week he sent the livery brougham to carry aunt and niece and boy to their new home. He sent Fiordelisa a little note by the coachman.
“Your house is ready. I shall call at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon to take a cup of tea in your drawing-room, and to hear if you approve of my furnishing.”
He received one of Lisa’s ill-written letters by the next morning’s post:—
“The rooms are lovely; everything is as pretty as a picture or a dream; but why did you not come this afternoon to let us thank you? Tomorrow is so far off.”
This little letter induced punctuality. He was at Lisa’s door on the stroke of the hour. The afternoon light was shining in at the south windows. The sun shone golden over the western river. There were daffodils in a glass vase on the little whitewood table in the oriel, and the new cups and saucers that he had chosen were set out upon a bamboo table with many shelves. Aunt and niece were neatly dressed in their black merino gowns,
