Transcriber’s Note
In this transcription, italic text is denoted by _underscores_ while
small capitals in the original text are transcribed as Title Case.
See end of this document for details of corrections and other changes.
—————————————— Start of Book ——————————————
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
COMPTON MACKENZIE
By COMPTON MACKENZIE
————————————————————
Rogues and Vagabonds
Fairy Gold
Coral
Santa Claus in Summer
The Heavenly Ladder
The Old Men of the Sea
The Altar Steps
Parson’s Progress
Rich Relations
The Seven Ages of Women
Sylvia Scarlett
Poor Relations
Sylvia and Michael
The Vanity Girl
Carnival
Plashers Mead
Sinister Street
Youth’s Encounter
The Passionate Elopement
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
By
COMPTON MACKENZIE
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ON MURRAY HILL : : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To A. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Neptune’s Grotto 11
II The Factory 26
III The Proposal 36
IV Married Life 43
V Tintacks in Brigham 55
VI The Diorama 74
VII True Love 83
VIII Rogues and Vagabonds 96
IX A Merry Christmas 110
X The Pantomime 121
XI The End of the Harlequinade 127
XII Looking for Work 135
XIII Lebanon House 144
XIV Letizia the First 163
XV The Tunnel 172
XVI Blackboy Passage 182
XVII The Two Roads 195
XVIII Triennial 215
XIX Nancy’s Contralto 222
XX Southward 232
XXI Classic Grief 240
XXII Sorrento 248
XXIII Cœur de Lion 267
XXIV Decennial 274
XXV The Common Chord 286
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
CHAPTER I NEPTUNE’S GROTTO
SUPERIOR
FIRE WORKS
at the
NEPTUNE’S GROTTO
Tavern and Tea Gardens
PIMLICO
on Thursday Evening, 20th, July, 1829.
By
MADAME ORIANO
The Celebrated Pyrotechnic to HIS MAJESTY
The Exhibition will include
A Grand Display of various kinds of
WATER FIRE WORKS
On the Grosvenor Basin.
ORDER OF FIRING
1. A Battery of Maroons, or imitation Cannon
2. A Bengal Light
3. Sky Rockets
4. A Saxon Wheel
5. Tourbillions
6. Phenomenon Box and Mime
7. Line Rockets
8. A Metamorphose with alternate changes, and a
beautiful display of Chinese Lattice Work
9. Sky Rockets
10. Horizontal Wheel with Roman Candles and Mine
11. Tourbillions
12. A regulating piece in two mutations, displaying
a Vertical Wheel changing to five Vertical Wheels
and a figure piece in Straw and brilliant fires
13. Grand Battery of Roman Candles & Italian
Streamers
14. A regulating piece in four mutations displaying a
Vertical Wheel changing to a Pyramid of Wheels,
a Brilliant Sun, and a superb shower of fire
15. Sky rockets
GRAND FINALE
MADEMOISELLE LETIZIA ORIANO
Will with a temerity hitherto unknown in the blazing
annals of her profession slide down an inclined rope
350 feet high, erected on the firework platform,
wreathed in Fizgigs and Fiery Serpents and accompanied
by the awful thunder of a Battery of Maroons.
Admission 1_s_ each
Gardens open at half-past seven, and commences at
Nine o’clock precisely.
“Neptune’s Grotto” was one of the many pleasure-gardens that in the
days when the Londoner was comparatively a free man helped to amuse his
leisure. Yet even by the ninth year of the reign of King George IV
most of the famous resorts of the preceding century had already been
built over, and now that Lord Grosvenor was developing the Manor of
Ebury (Buckingham Palace appearing fixed as the metropolitan abode of
the Sovereign) “Neptune’s Grotto” was likely to vanish soon and leave
no more trace of its sparkling life than the smoke of a spent rocket.
Indeed, change was already menacing. For two years Cubitt, the famous
builder, had been filling up the swampy land between Vauxhall Bridge
Road and Ranelagh with the soil he had excavated in the construction
of St. Katharine’s Docks. His cadaverous grey plastered terraces were
creeping nearer every week. Willow Walk, a low-lying footpath between
the cuts of the Chelsea Water Works, in a cottage hard by which Jerry
Abershaw and Gentleman James Maclaine the highwaymen once lodged, would
soon be turned into the haggard Warwick Street we know to-day. The
last osier bed would ultimately be replaced by the greasy aucubas of
Eccleston Square, and Lupus Street would lie heavy on ancient gardens.
The turnpike at Ebury Bridge had been gone these four years; the old
country road to Chelsea would within a lustrum be lined by houses on
either side and become Buckingham Palace Road. Even the great basin
of the Grosvenor Canal would run dry at last and breed from its mud
Victoria Station.
However, in 1829 “Neptune’s Grotto” still remained much as it had
been for over a century. The house of mellow red brick was covered
with lattice-work, which on this warm July evening was all fragrant
and ablow with climbing roses. Only the box trees had changed the
pattern of their topiary. In place of earlier warriors or statesmen you
would have found Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington at this date,
the general more freshly trimmed than the admiral, but likely to go
unpruned in the years of his unpopularity that were coming. His sacred
Majesty King George III had been allowed to sprout into the rounder
bulk of his sacred Majesty King George IV, but the new portrait was
hardly more attractive than the blowsy original. The garden paths were
bordered with stocks and hollyhocks. There were bowling-greens and
fishponds, and a dark alley in emulation of the notorious dark alley
of Vauxhall. Most of these amenities, however, had been made familiar
by a score of other pleasure-gardens all over London. What gave
“Neptune’s Grotto” its peculiar charm was the wide green lawn running
down to the edge of the great reservoir. In the middle of this was the
grotto itself, under the ferny arches of which an orchestra of Tritons
languorously invited the little world of pleasure to the waltz, or more
energetically commanded it to the gallopade. The firework platform was
built out over the water on piles; and the lawn was surrounded on three
sides by small alcoves lined with oyster shells, in some of which the
lightest footstep on a concealed mechanism would cause to spring up
a dolphin, or a mermaid, a harlequin or a Mother Shipton, startling
intruders for the maiden who first encountered them, so startling that
she would usually fling herself into the arms of the beau in escort and
require to be restored with various liquors much to the satisfaction of
Mr. Seedwell, the owner of the gardens.
High tortoiseshell combs and full curled hair, wide skirts of Gros de
Naples flounced and pinked and scalloped and fluted, white stockings
and slippers of yellow prunella, Leghorn hats of transparent crape
bound with lavender sarsenet or puffed with small bouquets of marabout,
bonnets of jonquil-yellow with waving ostrich plumes, bonnets of
marshmallow-rose with ribbons of lilac and hortensia floating loose,
double Vandyke collars of Indian muslin, grass-green parasols and
purple reticules, leg-of-mutton sleeves and satin roulades, pelisses
and pèlerines most fashionably of camelopard-yellow, ivory shoulders,
Canezon spencers and gauze capotes, fichus of ethereal-blue barège,
laughter and whispers and murmurs and music (ah, yes, no doubt and
plenty of simpers too), where now trains thunder past filled with jaded
suburbans, whose faces peep from the windows as their owners wonder
if the new film at the picture-theatre will be worth the trouble of
visiting after tea in our modish contemporary shades of nude, French
nude, sunburn, and flesh. Would that Stephenson had never cursed
humanity with his steam-engine, and would that this tale might never
creep nearer to the present than that July night of 1829! Alas, it has
more to do with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who
fluttered out like moths in that summer dusk to watch Madame Oriano’s
fireworks; and these at whom you gaze for the moment are but creatures
in a prologue who will all be ghosts long before the last page is
written.
However, here come those ghosts, still very much alive and shilling
in hand, some from Knightsbridge, some from Chelsea, some from
Westminster. “Strombolo House,” which used to charge half-a-crown for
its fireworks, so famous were they, is closed. To be sure the “Monster”
is still open, but there are no fireworks in the entertainment there
to-night; a performing bear is all that the “Monster” can offer
to-night. The “Orange Tea Gardens” are gone for good: St. Barnabas’
Pimlico, will occupy their site, and on it cause as much religious
rowdiness in another twenty years as ever there was of secular
rowdiness in the past. “Jenny’s Whim” hard by the old turnpike has
already been covered with builder Cubitt’s beastly foundations. There
is no longer much competition with “Neptune’s Grotto” in the manor
of Ebury. A few pause in Vauxhall Bridge Road when they see the
hackney-coaches filled with merry parties bound for the most famous
gardens of all; but they decide to visit them another evening, and
they cross the road to Willow Walk, where one remembers seeing Jerry
Abershaw’s body swinging from the gibbet on Putney Common and that
scarcely thirty years ago, and another marvels at the way the new
houses are springing up all round. Some shake their heads over Reform,
but most of them whisper of pleasure and of love while ghostly moths
spin beside the path, and the bats are seen hawking against the
luminous west and the dog-star which was glimmering long before his
fellows is already dancing like a diamond in the south.
While the public was strolling on its way to “Neptune’s Grotto,” within
the gardens themselves Mr. Seedwell, the proprietor, and Madame Oriano
made a final inspection of the firework platform.
“You think she can do it?” he was saying.
“Offa coursa she can do it,” Madame replied sharply.
Mr. Seedwell shook his head in grave doubt. Weighing eighteen stone and
a bit over he found it hard to put himself in Mademoiselle Letizia’s
place.
“I don’t want an accident,” he explained. “The magistrates are only too
glad of an excuse to close us down these days.”
“Dere willa not be no accident,” Madame Oriano assured him.
And Mr. Seedwell, looking at the raven-haired and raven-beaked and
raven-eyed woman beside him, took her word for it and went off to see
that all was ready inside the house for the entertainment of his guests.
Madame Oriano squeezed a handful of her yellow satin gown.
“_Bagnato!_”[1] she murmured to herself. Then looking across to one
of the alcoves she called out in a shrill harsh voice, “Caleb! Caleb
Fuller!”
[1] Wet.
A beetle could not have left his carapace more unwillingly than
Caleb Fuller that alcove. He was a young man—certainly not more than
twenty-five, perhaps not as much—whose lumpish and pasty face suggested
at first an extreme dulness of mind until one looked a little closer
and perceived a pair of glittering granite-grey eyes that animated the
whole countenance with an expression that passed beyond cunning and
touched intelligence. Beside the dragon-fly vividness of his employer
he appeared, as he shambled across the lawn to hear what she wanted of
him, like an awkward underground insect, with his turgid rump and thin
legs in tight pantaloons and his ill-fitting tail-coat of rusty black.
“Dissa English cleemat _non è possibile_,” Madame shrilled. “Everyting
willa be wet before we beginna to fire.”
“It’s the heavy dew,” said Caleb.
“Oh, _diavolo_! What do it matter which it is, if de fireworks will
alla be—how you say—spilt?”
“Spoilt,” he corrected gloomily.
“_Che lingua di animali, questa_ English linguage! Where issa John
Gumm?”
“In the tap-room,” Caleb informed her.
“Drinking! Drinking,” she shrilled. “Why you don’ta to keep him notta
to drink before we are finished?”
John Gumm who was Madame’s chief firer had already imperilled by his
habits several of her performances.
“Somebody musta go and putta clothes on de fireworks. _Non voglio che
abbiamo un fiasco_,[2] I don’ta wish it. You hear me, Caleb?”
[2] “I do not want us to have a fiasco.”
Caleb was used to these outbursts of nervous anxiety before every
display, and on most evenings he would have humoured Madame by bullying
the various assistants and have enjoyed giving such an exhibition of
his authority. But this evening he would not have been sorry to see the
damp air make the whole display such a fiasco as Madame feared, for
he bitterly resented the public appearance of Letizia Oriano, not so
much for the danger of the proposed feat, but for the gratification the
sight of her shapely legs would afford the crowd. In fact when Madame
had summoned him to her side, he was actually engaged in a bitter
argument with Letizia herself and had even gone so far as to beg her to
defy her mother and refuse to make the fire-clad descent.
“There won’t be enough dew to prevent the firing,” he argued. “And
more’s the pity,” he added, gathering boldness as jealousy began once
more to rack him. “More’s the pity, I say, when you’re letting your
only child expose her—expose herself to danger.” He managed to gulp
back the words he just lacked the courage to fling at her, and though
his heart beat “Jezebel! Jezebel!” he dared not say it out.
“Dere is nottings dangerous,” she snapped. “She has walked the slacka
rope and the tighta rope since she was a _bambina_. Her fazer has
learnt her to do it.”
Caleb groaned within himself. Letizia’s father was as mythical and as
many-sided as Proteus. Italian prince, English nobleman, play-actor,
ballet-master, acrobat, with as many aliases as a thief, he was
whatever Madame chose he should be to suit her immediate argument.
Nobody knew his real name or his real profession. Once, when Caleb had
remonstrated with her for being apparently willing to sell Letizia to a
rich and snivelling old rake, she had actually dared to argue that she
was better capable of guarding her daughter’s virtue than anybody else
because the father of her had been a cardinal. Caleb, who was sick with
love for Letizia and sick with hate for Popery, was near losing his
reason. Luckily, however, the old suitor fell into a hopeless palsy,
and since then Madame’s financial affairs had prospered sufficiently
to make her independent of Letizia’s cash value. That her affairs had
prospered was largely due to Caleb himself, who, entering her service
as a clerk when he was hardly nineteen, had lost no time in gathering
into his own plump white hands the tangled skeins of the business so
that he might unravel them at his own convenience without ever again
letting them go.
Madame Oriano had been glad enough to put the financial side of the
business in Caleb’s hands, for, having inherited from her father,
Padua’s chief artist in pyrotechny, a genuine passion for inventing
new effects, she devoted herself to these with renewed interest, an
interest moreover that was no longer liable to be interrupted by
amours. She had grown gaunt and her temper, never of the sweetest,
had long made her an impossible mistress for any man however young
he might be. At the age of sixteen she had eloped from her father’s
house in Padua with an English adventurer. After a year of doubtful
bliss he had left her stranded in a Soho garret with a cageful of
love-birds and twenty pairs of silk stockings—he had intended these
as a present for the schoolgirl he was planning to abduct, but in the
confusion of escaping from his old sweetheart he had left them behind
him. Maria Oriano entered upon a period of fortune-telling, then went
into partnership with an Italian pyrotechnist to whom with intervals
of amorous escapades she remained loyal for ten years, in fact till he
died, after which she carried on the business in her own name. Letizia
was born when her mother was approaching forty, and since neither
Letizia nor anybody else ever discovered who the father was, it may
safely be assumed that Madame really did not know herself which of her
lovers might be congratulated. She had a dozen in tow about this time.
No solution of the mystery had ever been provided by Letizia herself,
who now, at seventeen, was the image of her own mother when she, a
year younger, ran away from Padua, a dark and slim and supple and
lustrous-eyed young termagant.
There she was now, fretfully tapping the floor of the alcove with her
dainty foot and wondering what her mother could want with Caleb. It
was not that she wanted Caleb so much for herself, not at any rate
for the pleasure of his conversation. But she was used to quarrelling
with him, and she missed his company much as a child might miss a toy
that it could maltreat whenever it was in the mood to do so. She might
laugh at his awkward attempts to make love to her, but she would have
been piqued by his indifference, piqued and puzzled by it as she would
have been puzzled by the failure of her spaniel to wag its tail when
she entered a room. There was Caleb bowing and scraping to her mother
(who looked a pretty sight in that yellow satin gown) while she who
after all was this evening indubitably _the_ attraction was left alone
in this dull alcove without so much as a glass of champagne to sip.
How much would her mother worry about the dampness of the fireworks,
were she to announce that she could not make the descent that was to
bring the display to such a grand conclusion? It would serve them all
right if she did rebel. They would appreciate her much more were she
sometimes to assert herself. Letizia pulled open the cloak of light
blue velvet that she was wearing over her costume and contemplated her
slim legs and the beautifully unwrinkled tights. The upper part of her
dress consisted of an abbreviated tunic of asbestos round which the
unlit fireworks coiled like blue snakes.
“Or sausages,” murmured Letizia resentfully. “If I did not look like
Guy Fawkes and if it were a little darker, I’d put on a mask and have
such fun amongst the crowd. Oh gemini, wouldn’t I just!”
She jumped up in a fit of impatience. Her foot pressed the concealed
mechanism in the floor of the alcove, and immediately there sprang up
before her a life-size Mother Shipton, quivering all over and shaking
her steeple hat, and seeming in the twilight most horribly real.
“Gesù Maria, Giuseppe!” she shrieked, crossing herself in an agony of
terror.
Caleb, whose first thought was that some young buck was trying to kiss
Letizia, paid no more attention to Madame Oriano’s complaints of Gumm’s
drunkenness and the dewy nightfall, but plunged off to the rescue,
splitting the seat of his pantaloons in an effort to move his clumsy
legs really fast.
“Oh gemini, Caleb, the Devil’s been sitting beside me all the time and
I never knew it,” Letizia cried, when she saw him.
“I make no doubt he has,” said Caleb in lugubrious agreement. “But this
ain’t him. This ain’t no more than one of those fortune-telling figures
you’ll see at fairs. That’s what they call fun, that is,” he groaned.
“It sprang up so sudden, Caleb. The Devil couldn’t have sprung up no
faster. Oh gemini, it set me off praying, Caleb.”
“Praying!” he scoffed. “I wouldn’t give much for you if the Devil did
come to take you, and you had to trust to your prayers.”
“It’s made my heart thump, Caleb. Only feel how fast it beats.”
The young man snatched his hand away from her.
“Hussy! Nought would please you so well as to lead me on into sin.”
It was Caleb’s heart that was beating now, so fast indeed that he
turned in desperation to strike down the puppet that seemed to be
leering at him like an old bawd in a dark entry.
“Oh, you sicken me,” she pouted. “I’ll surely never have the courage to
mount to the top of the mast now. At least, I won’t unless I have some
champagne, Caleb.”
There was no answer.
“Did you hear me, Caleb?” she pressed softly. “I said champagne.”
He turned his back and feigned not to hear. But a passing waiter heard
and came into the alcove, rubbing his hands in anticipation of serving
them.
“Champagne, Caleb.”
“Yes, ma’am. Certainly, ma’am.”
“No,” Caleb shouted.
The waiter inclined his head in sarcastic acknowledgment.
“And light the lamp,” Caleb told him.
Above the circular stone hung a great green globe painted over with
fish, which when lighted up shed a kind of subaqueous sheen upon the
alcove.
“And the champagne, sir?” the waiter asked.
“Bring a bottle quickly,” Letizia commanded with a laugh of mockery.
“Bring nothing at all,” cried Caleb, swinging round on his heels in a
rage.
“Oh gemini, Caleb,” Letizia cried. “Your handkerchief’s falling out of
your pocket.”
She grabbed at it, and pulled out the tail of his shirt.
Letizia flung herself into a chair, clapping her hands and throwing
her legs into the air in a very ecstasy of delight.
“Oh gemini, Mr. Waiter; bring two bottles,” she cried. “And a needle
and a thread, for I’ll burst my own trunks next and never dare stand on
a chair, let alone come sliding down to the ground from a mast.”
The waiter departed to obey her commands, a wide grin on his insolent
face.
“Listen to me, Letizia,” Caleb cried in a rage, seizing her wrist.
“I’ll pay for not one drop of champagne, d’ye hear me? Little Jezebel
that you are! You love to make me suffer for your wantonness. I was
pure till your Popish gipsy eyes crossed mine and turned them to
thoughts of sin. Isn’t it enough that you’re going to mount that
accursed firework platform for every gay young sprig to stare at you
carnally and gloat on your limbs and lust after you? Isn’t it enough, I
say, for one evening?”
“You’re a fine one to accuse me of making myself a show,” she retorted,
wresting herself from his grasp. “And you with the tail of your shirt
sticking out of your breeches! You’d better call it your flag of truce,
Caleb, and cry peace.”
“I’ll make no peace with you, young Jezebel, in this wanton humour.”
“Why then, catch me if you can, Mr. Preacher, for I’ll have my
champagne, and Mr. Devil can pay for it, if you won’t.”
With this she stood mocking him from the lawn outside.
“Come back,” he groaned, the sweat all beady on his forehead.
“I won’t come back neither,” laughed Letizia, pirouetting.
“Pull your cloak round you, shameless minx.”
“No, and I won’t do that, neither.”
She flung it farther from her and taunted him with the sight of her
legs so slim and so shapely in the light blue silk.
“You dursn’t run after me, Caleb, or you’ll be taken to Bedlam for a
lunatic when the people see you running after me like a draggle-tailed
duck. Quack-quack, Caleb! I’m the grand finale to-night, and if you
won’t give me champagne I’ll find some one who will, and he’ll have the
grandest finale of all.”
Unfortunately for Letizia when she turned round to run away she ran
into her mother, who caught her by the ear and led her back into the
alcove.
“_Sei pazza?_” she demanded.
“If I am mad, it’s his fault,” protested Letizia angrily. “Let go of my
ear, mamma! You’re hurting me.”
“_Vuoi far la putanella, eh?_”[3] cried Madame Oriano furiously,
squeezing her daughter’s ear even harder.
[3] “You want to play the little wanton, eh?”
“Eh, _basta_,[4] mamma! Or I’ll be no grand finale to-night for you or
nobody else. I only asked for champagne because that old witch jumped
up out of the floor and frightened me. If you hadn’t been screaming so
loud yourself, you might have heard me scream.”
[4] Enough.
“_Insolente_,” cried Madame, making coral of her daughter’s ivory
cheeks with several vicious slaps.
Luckily for Letizia the waiter came back at this moment with a tray on
which were glasses and the bottle of champagne. This gave Madame Oriano
a real opportunity. Picking up her skirt as if she were going to drop a
curtsey, she raised one foot and kicked the tray and its contents up to
the oyster-inlaid ceiling of the alcove. She might have been giving the
signal for the fireworks to begin, for just as the contents of the tray
crashed to the ground the thunder of the maroons reverberated about the
pale sapphire of the nine o’clock sky.
Madame hurried out into the excited crowd of spectators, clapping her
skinny hands and crying, “_Bravo! Bravimissimo!_” at the top of her
voice. She believed in the power of the claque and always led the
applause of her own creations. Immediately after the maroons the Bengal
light flared and turned the upturned faces of the crowd to a lurid
rose, the glassy waters of the basin to garnets. Letizia, who had been
sobbing with pain and fury while the maroons were exploding, responded
with all her being to the excitement of the Bengal light. She forgot
her pain, her rage, her disappointment. She quivered like the Mother
Shipton, became like the puppet a mere dressed-up spring. She longed
for the moment when she should be summoned to ascend the platform and
climb the mast to the crow’s-nest on the summit, and most of all for
the moment she should hear the sausages round her asbestos tunic fizz
and cackle and spit, and when wreathed in flames, balancing herself
with a flashing Italian streamer in each hand, she should slide down
the long rope into the tumultuous cheers of the public below.
Caleb was aware of her eagerness and, having in himself nothing of the
mountebank, supposed that she was merely longing to display her legs to
the mob. He vented the bile of his jealousy upon the waiter.
“I’ll report you to Mr. Seedwell,” he stormed. “How dare you bring
champagne without an order?”
“Madame....”
“Get out of here,” Caleb shouted. “This is no madam, you lousy wretch.
I’ll have no rascals like you come pimping round this young lady.”
Sky rockets were shedding their fiery blossoms upon the air, and the
water below was jewelled with their reflections. Tourbillions leapt up
to tremble for a moment in golden spirals. Mutation followed mutation
as shivered wheels of rubies turned to fountains of molten emeralds and
amethysts and blazing showers of topaz. Above the explosions, above
the applause, the shrill voice of Madame Oriano rang out continually,
“_Bravo! Bravissimo! Ancora! Bene! Benissimo! Che Splendore! Che
magnificenza!_”
Letizia stood rapt like a saint that expects a corporeal assumption to
the seventh heaven.
“It’s time I went up,” she breathed.
“Not yet,” Caleb pleaded, in horror of the moment when that lewd and
accursed mob should gloat upon her slim form.
“It is. It is! Let me go, Caleb! Gemini, you crazy fool, you’ll make me
late.”
Letizia sprang away from his detaining arms.
“Why don’t you set fire to your shirt, Caleb, and slide down behind
me?” she called back to him in mockery.
There were shouts of enthusiasm when the figure of Letizia stood up
dimly against the stars. Followed a silence. Old John Gumm fired the
fizgigs and the serpents. With a shriek of triumphant joy Letizia
launched herself from the mast. High above the wondering murmurs of the
crowd her mother’s voice resounded.
“_Che bella ragazza!_[5] _Brava! Bravissima! Avanti, figlia mia! Che
forma di Venere!_”[6]
[5] “What a lovely girl!”
[6] “Forward, my daughter! What a figure of Venus!”
“Almighty God,” Caleb groaned. “She might be naked.”
When the flaming vision touched earth, he rushed forward to recapture
it; but Letizia, intoxicated with success, flung herself into the arms
of three or four young bucks who were waiting to carry her off to
champagne, while from the grotto in the middle of the lawn the Triton
orchestra struck up Weber’s seductive _Invitation to the Waltz_.