And then she told him the history of her diamonds; how the manager of the Apollo had first doubled, and then trebled, and quadrupled her salary; how she had kept the money in her trunk, all in gold, sovereigns upon sovereigns, and how she and her aunt had counted the gold every week, and how only last Saturday she and la Zia had gone off in a cab to Piccadilly, with a bag full of gold, and had bought the diamonds, which were now shining on Fiordelisa’s throat.
“We had less than half the price of the necklace,” concluded Lisa, “but when the jeweller heard who I was, he insisted that I should take it away with me, and pay him by degrees, just as I find convenient, so I shall pay him my salary every Saturday until I am out of debt.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” said Sefton. “Do you and your aunt live upon rose leaves and dew, Signora; or how is it that you can afford to invest all your earnings in diamonds?”
“Oh, we have other money,” answered Lisa, with a defiant glance at the questioner. “I need not sing unless I like.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Sefton, strengthened in his conviction that Signora Vivanti was not altogether so “straight” as Hawberk believed, or affected to believe.
Mr. Sefton was not so confiding as the composer. He was a man prone to think badly of women, and he was inclined to think the worst of this brilliant Venetian, much as he admired her. He followed her like a shadow for the rest of the evening, escorted her up the narrow staircase, and stood near the piano while she sang, and then took her from the stifling atmosphere of the lamplit house to the semidarkness of the garden, which Mrs. Hawberk had converted into a tent, shutting out the wintry sky, and enclosing the miniature lawn and surrounding shrubbery; a tent dimly lighted with fairy lamps, nestling among the foliage. Here he sat talking with Lisa in a shadowy corner, while three or four other couples murmured and whispered in other nooks and corners, and while Hawberk, feeling he had done his duty as host, smoked and drank whisky and soda with a little group of chosen friends—an actor, a journalist, a playwright, and a brace of musical critics, who had an inexhaustible flow of speech, and a delicious unconsciousness of time.
Sefton too was unconscious of time, talking with Lisa in that soft Italian tongue, having to bend his head very near the full red lips in order to catch the Venetian elisions, the gentle, sliding syllables.
The hum of voices, the occasional ripples of laughter, the music and song, dwindled and died into silence—even the lights in the lower windows grew dim, and gradually Sefton awakened to the fact that the party was at an end, and that he and Signora Vivanti, and Hawberk’s Bohemian group yonder, were all that remained of Mrs. Hawberk’s musical evening. He bent down to look at his watch by one of the fairy lamps.
Three o’clock.
“By Jove, we are sitting out everybody else,” he said, with a pleased laugh, triumphant at the thought that he had been able to amuse and interest his companion. “Three o’clock. Very late for a musical evening. You did not know it was so late, did you, Signora?”
“No,” answered Lisa, carelessly; “but I don’t mind. I’ve been enjoying myself.”
“So have I; but it’s rather rough on Mrs. Hawberk, who may want to rest from her labours.”
“I am quite ready to go home as soon as I get my shawl,” said Lisa, rising from the low wicker chair, straight as a dart, her neck and shoulders and long bare arms looking like marble in the glimmer of the toy lamps. Sefton stood and looked at her, drinking her loveliness as if it had been a draught of wine from an enchanted cup. Oh, the charm of those Italian eyes; so brilliant, yet so soft; so darkly deep! Could there be any magic in fairyland more potent than the spell this Calypso was weaving round him?
“May I call your carriage?” he asked.
“I have no carriage. I live close by.”
“Let me see you home, then.”
She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture which meant that the question wasn’t worth disputing, and Sefton followed her across the little bit of grass to the house door. Hawberk stopped her on her way.
“What, my Vivanti not gone yet!” he cried. “I would have had another song out of you if I had known you were there. What have you and Mr. Sefton found to say to each other all this time?”
“We have found plenty to say. He has been talking Italian, which none of you stupid others can talk. It is a treat to hear my own language from someone besides la Zia. Good night, Signor. Shall I find la Signora to wish her good night?”
“No, child. La Signora Hawberkini retired to rest an hour ago, when all the respectable people had gone. She did not wait to see the last of such night-birds as you and Sefton, and these disreputable journalists here.”
“I love the night,” said Lisa, in no wise abashed. “It is ever so much nicer than day.”
The servants had vanished, but she found her wrap lying on a sofa—an old red silk shawl, a Bellagio shawl, whose dinginess went ill with her velvet gown and diamond necklace; but she wrapped it about her head and shoulders, nothing caring, and she looked a real Italian peasant as she turned to Sefton in the light of the hall lamps. He admired her even more at this moment than he had admired her before—he liked to think of her as a peasant; with no womanly sensitiveness to suffer, no pride to be wounded; divided from him socially by a great gulf of difference; and so much the more surely, and so much the more lightly to be won.
They went out into the
