AS A SPIRIT FROM DREAM TO DREAM.
Lady Hartley, once being reconciled to the inevitable, was full of
kindness for her brother’s future wife. Eve had seen nothing of London
and its gaieties, and as the Hartleys had taken a house in Bruton
Street for the season, it seemed only a natural thing to take her up to
town with them, and initiate her into some of the pleasures to which
her future position would entitle her.
“And when you are married I can present you,” she told Eve. “It isn’t
worth while going through that ordeal till next year. You will have
plenty to do between now and midsummer in getting your trousseau ready.”
Eve blushed, and was silent for a few minutes, and then, as she was
alone with Lady Hartley in the morning-room at Redwold, she took
courage, and said--
“I’m afraid my trousseau will be a very small one. I asked my father
last night what he could do for me, and he said fifty pounds would be
the utmost he could give me. It wouldn’t be overmuch if I were going to
marry a curate, would it?”
“My dearest Eve, fifty pounds will go a long way, as I shall manage
things. Remember I am going to be your sister, a real sister, not a
sham one, and while we are buying the trousseau your purse and mine
shall be one.”
“Oh, I couldn’t allow that. I couldn’t let myself sponge upon you. I
would rather be married in white alpaca.”
“My child, you shall not be married in alpaca. And as for sponging
upon me, well, if you are so mightily proud you can pay me back every
shilling I spend for you, a year or so hence, out of your pin-money.”
“My pin-money,” repeated Eve. “Father told me how generously Mr.
Vansittart had offered to settle an income upon me--upon me who bring
him nothing, not even a respectable trousseau.”
“Now, Eve, I won’t hear a word more about the trousseau, until we are
going about shopping together.”
“You are too kind, yet I can’t help feeling it hard to begin by taxing
your generosity. Isn’t it the custom for the bride to bring the house
linen in her trousseau?”
“Oh, in bourgeois families no doubt, and with young people just setting
up in the world; but Merewood is provided with linen. You can’t suppose
mother and Jack have lived there without tablecloths or dusters.
There is nothing for you to think about, Eve, but your own frocks,
and we will think about them together. I adore shopping, and all the
frivolities of life.”
* * * * *
Ten days later Eve was in London, a petted guest in one of the
prettiest houses in Bruton Street. Lady Hartley had the knack of
beautifying any house she lived in, even a furnished house, a tent that
was to be shifted at the end of the season. Huge boxes of flowers were
sent up from Redwold every other day to decorate those London rooms,
and not content with this floral decoration, Maud Hartley was always
buying things--china, lamps, baskets, elegant frivolities of all kinds,
to make the hired house homelike.
She would apologize to her husband in an airy way for each fresh
extravagance. “That pretty china plaque caught my eye at Howell and
James’s while Eve and I were looking at their silks,” she would say.
Sir Hubert complained laughingly that if the Kohinoor were for sale at
a London jeweller’s it would inevitably catch Maud’s eye.
“And her eye once caught she is hypnotized,” said Sir Hubert. “She must
buy.”
Charles Street and Bruton Street are very near. Vansittart could run
over, as his sister called it, at any and every hour of the day; and
the result of this vicinity was that he lived more in his sister’s
house than in his mother’s. But Mrs. Vansittart was kind, and seemed
really pleased with her future daughter-in-law; so when Jack was not
in Bruton Street Eve was in Charles Street, at luncheon sometimes,
but oftener at afternoon tea, and at cosy little dinners, in the
arrangement of which Mrs. Vansittart excelled. She knew a great many
people in London, military, clerical, legal, literary, and artistic,
and she knew how to blend her society and bring people together who
really liked to meet each other.
This world of London in the season was a new world to Eve Marchant;
these homes in which the pinch of poverty, the burden of debt, had
never been felt, had a new atmosphere. Her spirits, gay even in the
midst of household care, rose in these happier circles, and she charmed
all who met her by her spontaneous graces of mind and manner, her
quickness to perceive, her ready appreciation of wit and sense in
others.
For Vansittart that month of May in the great city was a period of
consummate happiness. The freshness of Eve’s feelings gave a new
flavour to the commonest things. Parks and gardens, picture-galleries,
concerts and theatres, were all new to her. Only on the rarest
occasions had she been gratified by an evening in London and the sight
of a famous actor. Her father had always excused himself from taking
his daughters to any public amusements on the plea of poverty.
All the Marchant girls had known of London began and ended in the
drapers’ shops and the after-season sales. To travel to town by an
early train, third class, to tramp about all day in mud or dust,
as the case might be, snatching a skimped luncheon at some homely
pastry-cook’s, was the utmost they had known of metropolitan pleasures;
and even days so unluxurious had been holidays for them. To see the
shop windows, to have the spending of a little money, ever so little,
meant happiness. It was only when they had emptied their purses that
the shadow of care descended upon them, and they began to doubt whether
they had invested their pittance wisely.
Now Eve moved about like a queen, among people who never had to
think of money. She was taken to see everything that was worth
seeing; to hear everything that was worth hearing. She saw all the
picture-galleries, and learnt to discriminate between all the schools
of modern art. She heard Sarasate, and Hollmann, and Menter, and all
the great instrumentalists of her epoch. She never heard of cabs or
omnibuses, or fares, or money given for tickets. She was carried hither
and thither in a luxurious barouche or a snug brougham, and her place
at concert and play was always ready for her--one of the best places in
the hall or the theatre. The dressmakers, and bootmakers, and milliners
to whom Lady Hartley took her never talked of money; indeed they seemed
almost to shudder at any allusion to that vulgar drudge ’twixt man and
man. The people at the tailor’s were as interested in the gowns and
coats they were to make for her as if they had been works of art for
which fame would be the sole recompense. The Frenchwoman who was to
make her wedding-gown poohpoohed the question of cost. Expensive, this
frisé velvet for the train--yes, that might be, but she would rather
make Mademoiselle a present of the fabric than that, with her tall and
graceful figure, she should wear anything commonplace or insignificant.
Art for art’s sake was ostensibly the motto for all Bond Street.
And Eve had so much to think of that she could not think very seriously
about her trousseau. She let Lady Hartley order what she pleased. She,
Eve, had her lover to think about; and that was an absorbing theme. She
knew his footstep on the pavement below the open window; she knew the
sound of the bell when he rang it. If the weather were wet, and he came
from Charles Street in a hansom, she knew his way of throwing back the
cab doors before the wheels stopped. When he was absent, all her life
was made up of thinking about him and listening for his coming. In that
morning hour in the drawing-room before he arrived she might have sat
to Sir Frederick Leighton for “Waiting” or “Expectancy.”
* * * * *
It was scarcely strange that while John Vansittart was so absorbed in
the new delight of his life, John Smith was just a little neglectful of
his protégées in Saltero’s Mansion, Chelsea. John Smith had, indeed,
no consciousness of being neglectful. If the image of Lisa flashed
across his mind in any moment of his full and happy day, it came and
went together with the comfortable thought that he had done his duty
to that young woman. She had her aunt, her bright and pretty home,
her singing-master, and all the delightful hopes and ambitions of an
artist who has discovered that she has fortune within her reach. Had
he thought of Lisa all day long, he could never have pictured her
otherwise than happy and contented.
He was at Covent Garden one evening with his sister and his betrothed,
and he saw the Venetian amidst her troops of companions. The opera was
_William Tell_, and Lisa was in short petticoats and Swiss bodice,
with gold chains about her neck and arms, and gold daggers in her
hair. She looked very pretty, amidst that heterogeneous crew of young,
middle-aged, and elderly. He was in the stalls, and at a considerable
distance from the stage, and those dark eyes did not find him out and
fasten upon him as they had done that other night when he was in Lady
Davenant’s box. The sight of her reminded him that it was nearly a
month since he had called upon the aunt and niece, and that she ought
to have made some progress with her musical training in the interval,
progress enough, at any rate, to make the childish creature anxious to
report herself to him.
Eve was to be engaged at her dressmaker’s on the following afternoon,
in a solemn ordeal described as “trying on;” and Vansittart had been
warned by his sister that he must not expect to be favoured with her
society until the evening, when they were all to dine in Charles
Street. It seemed to him that he could hardly employ this afternoon
better than in visiting Fiordelisa and her aunt, whose warm southern
hearts would be wounded perhaps if he should seem to have lost all
interest in their welfare.
The day was delightful--one of those brilliant afternoons in May which
give to West End London the air of an earthly paradise; a paradise
of smart shops and smart people, thorough-bred horses and newly
built carriages, liveries spick and span from the tailor’s; flowers
everywhere--in the carriages, in the shops, on the kerbstone--flowers
and fine clothes and spring sunshine. Vansittart walked to Chelsea,
glad of an excuse for a walk after the habitual carriage or hansom.
He had promised to look at some pictures in Tite Street upon this
very afternoon--pictures of that advanced Belgian school whose work
he would scarcely care to show to Miss Marchant without a previous
inspection--so he availed himself of the opportunity, and called at the
painter’s house on his way to Saltero’s Mansion.
He found a room full of people, looking at pictures set round on
easels draped with terra-cotta silk, criticizing freely and talking
prodigiously. He found himself in the midst of an artistic tea-party.
There was a copper kettle singing over a spirit-lamp on a table crowded
with Spanish irises, and there was the painter’s young English wife, in
an orange-coloured Liberty gown, pouring out tea, and smiling at the
praises of her husband.
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 to-day? 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 æsthetic 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 tea-cake, 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 story-books; ‘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 in them,
the careless arrangement of the coarse black hair, the supple figure
in its plain black gown, and the essentially foreign air which years
of residence in England would hardly obliterate. “Never, Si’ora! Your
every glance is eloquent of Venice and her sister isles. It seems
almost a crime to keep you captive in this sunless city of ours.”
“Oh, but I adore London,” she exclaimed, “and your London is not
sunless. See how the sun is shining on the river this afternoon; not as
it shines on the lagunes in May, I grant you, but it is a very pretty
piccolo sole.”
“And la Zia,” asked Vansittart; “she is well, I hope?”
“She is more than well. She is getting fat. Oh, so fat. She is as happy
as the day is long. She loves your London, the King’s Road most of all.
At night there are barrows, fish, vegetables, everything. She can do
her marketing by lamplight, and the streets are almost as full and as
gay as the Merceria. La Zia was never so happy in all her life as she
is in London. She never had so much to eat.”
They were near Saltero’s Mansion by this time.
“You will come in and let me make you some tea, won’t you?” pleaded
Lisa.
“Not this afternoon, Si’ora. I wanted to see you, to know that all was
going well with you. Having done that, I must go back to the West End
to--to keep an appointment.”
He was thinking that possibly Eve’s “trying on” would be finished in
time for him to snatch half an hour’s tête-à-tête in one of the Bruton
Street drawing-rooms, before she dressed for dinner. There were three
drawing-rooms, in a diminishing perspective, dwindling almost to a
point, the third and inner room too small to serve any purpose but
flirtation, and here the lovers could usually find seclusion.
Lisa pouted and looked unhappy.
“You might stay and take tea with me,” she said; “la Zia will be home
soon.”
“La Zia is out, then?”
“Yes; she has taken Paolo to Battersea Park for the afternoon. The
rehearsal for the new opera keeps me all day long, and la Zia takes the
boy for his daily walk; but it is past five, and they will be home as
soon as I am, I dare say.”
“I will come this way again in a week or so, Si’ora.”
“You are very unkind,” protested Lisa, in her impulsive way; and then,
with one of those sudden changes which so well became her childish
beauty, she exclaimed, “No, no; forgive me; you are always kind--kind,
kindest of men. Promise you will come again soon.”
“I promise,” he said, stopping short and offering his hand.
“Then I’ll walk back just a little piece of way with you--only as far
as the big house with the swans.”
Lisa’s company on Cheyne Walk was an honour which Vansittart would
have gladly escaped. She was too pretty and too peculiar-looking not
to attract notice; and there was the tea-party in Tite Street, with
its little crowd of worldlings, any of whom would be curious as to his
companion, should he by chance be seen in this society. He did not want
to be rude, for the lace-girl from Burano was a creature of strong
feelings, and was easily wounded.
“I am in a desperate hurry, Si’ora.”
“You were not in a hurry when I overtook you just now. You were walking
slowly. You cannot walk faster than I. At Burano I never used to walk.
I always ran.”
“Poverina! How quickly you must have used up your island.”
“Yes; it was like a prison. I used to watch the painted sails of
the fishing-boats, and long for them to carry me away to any place
different from that island, where I knew every face and every
paving-stone. That is why I love your London, in spite of fogs and grey
skies. It is so big, so big.”
She stopped, with clasped hands and flashing eyes. A street boy wheeled
round to look at her, and gave a low whistle of admiring surprise; and
at the same instant Sefton turned a street corner, came across the
road, and passed close to Vansittart and his companion.
Of all men living, this man was the last whom Vansittart would have
cared to meet under such conditions.