The painter was no phlegmatic Fleming, but a fiery son of French Flanders. He came from the red country between Namur and Liege, and had been reared and educated in the latter city.
He was standing by the largest of his pictures—a scene from Manon Lescaut—and listening to the criticisms of a little knot of people, all ecstatic, and among these élite of the art-loving world Vansittart was surprised to see Mr. Sefton.
Sefton turned at the sound of Vansittart’s voice. They had met a good many times since Easter, and in a good many houses, for it was one of Sefton’s attributes to be seen everywhere; but Vansittart had not expected to find him at a comparatively unknown painter’s tea-party.
“Delightful picture, ain’t it?” he asked carelessly. “Full of truth and feeling. How is Miss Marchant today? I thought she looked a little pale and fagged at Lady Heavyside’s last night, as if her first season were taking it out of her.”
“I don’t think my sister would let her do too much.” They had drifted towards the tea-table, and the crowd had stranded them in a corner, where they could talk at their ease. “I did not know you were by way of being an art critic.”
“I am by way of being everything. I give myself up to sport—body and bones—all the winter. I let my poor little intellect hibernate from the first of September till I have been at the killing of a May fox; and then I turn my back upon rusticity, put on my frock-coat and cylinder hat, and see as much as I can of the world of art and letters. To that end I have chosen this street for my summer habitation.”
“You live here—in Tite Street?”
“Is that so surprising? Tite Street is not a despicable locality. We consider ourselves rather smart.”
“I should have looked for you nearer the clubs.”
“I am by no means devoted to the clubs. I like my own nest and my own newspapers. Is not this charming?”
He turned to admire a cabinet picture on a draped easel—Esmeralda and the Captain of the Guard; one of those pictures which Vansittart would have preferred Eve Marchant not to see, but over which aesthetic maids and matrons were expatiating rapturously.
Vansittart did not stop to take tea, meaning to gratify Lisa by allowing her to entertain him with the mild infusion she called by that name. He spoke to the two or three people he knew, praised the pictures in very good French to the artist, who knew no English, and slipped out of the sultry room, redolent of violets and teacake, into the fresh air blowing up the river from the woods and pastures of Bucks and Berks.
He had not walked above half a dozen yards upon the Embankment when he heard the sound of hurrying footsteps behind him, and an ungloved hand was thrust through his arm, and a joyous voice exclaimed breathlessly, “At last! You were going to see me? I thought you had forgotten us altogether.”
“That was very wrong of you, Signora,” he answered, gently disengaging himself from the olive-complexioned hand, plump and tapering, albeit somewhat broad—such a hand as Titian painted by the score, perhaps, before he began to paint Cardinal Princes and great ladies.
He did not want to walk along the Chelsea Embankment, in the broad glare of day, with the Venetian hanging affectionately upon him. That kind of thing might pass on the Lido, or in the Royal Garden by the canal, but here the local colour was wanting.
“It is ages since you have been near us,” protested Fiordelisa, poutingly. “I am sure you must have forgotten us.”
“Not I, Signora. Englishmen don’t forget their friends so easily. I have been in the country till—till quite lately. And you—tell me how you have been getting on with your singing-master.”
“He shall tell you,” cried Fiordelisa, flashing one of her brightest looks upon him. “He pretends to be monstrously pleased with me. He declares that in a few months, perhaps even sooner, he will get me an engagement at one of the small theatres, to sing in a comic opera. They will give me ever so much more money than I am earning at Coveny Gardeny.”
The Venetian often put a superfluous vowel at the end of a word, not yet having mastered our severe terminal consonants. “The maestro is to have some of the money for his trouble, but that is fair, is it not?”
“Fair that he should take a small percentage, perhaps, but not more.”
“A percentage? What is that?”
Vansittart explained.
“But to sing in your English comic opera I must speak English ever so much better than I do now,” pursued Lisa, “and for that I am working, oh, so hard. I learn grammar. I read storybooks; Bootle’s Baby; the Vicar of Wakefield. Oh, how I have laughed and cried over that Vicar and his troubles—and Olivia—Olivia who was so deceived—and so happy at last.”
“Happy, with a scoundrel,” exclaimed Vansittart.
“Ah, but she loved him. One does not mind how much scoundrel if one loves a man.”
“A bad principle, Signorina. It is better to love a good man ever so little than a scoundrel ever so much.”
“No, no, no. It is the loving much that means happiness,” argued Lisa, and then she expatiated upon her English studies. “La Zia and I go to the theatre when there is no performance at Coveny Gardeny. We sit in the pit, where the people are kind, and make room for us because we are foreigners. Signor Zinco says there is no better way of learning English than in listening to the actors in good plays. Oh, how I listen! In three months from this day people will take me for an Englishwoman,” she said finally.
“Never, Lisa, never,” he said, laughingly contemplative of the sparkling olive face, the great dark eyes with golden lights
