“SO VERY WILFUL.”
Another Easter over, another season beginning, and with all the usual
auguries of a season of exceptional splendour--auguries to be exchanged
later for dismal elegies upon a season of surpassing dulness and
stagnation, which had disappointed everybody, and all but ruined the
West End tradesmen. As this jubilant vaticination and these melancholy
wailings are repeated year after year, they have come to be of little
more significance than the chirping of the newly arriving swifts under
the eaves, or the twittering of the swallows assembled for their
autumnal flight. Seasons come and seasons go. People are hopeful before
the fact, and disappointed after the fact; the great chorus of humanity
goes on. Such is life. A season of hope and disillusion. Contemplate
existence from the severest standpoint of the agnostic metaphysician,
or from the most exalted platform of the Christian saint, and the
ultimate fact is the same. We begin in hope to end in sorrow.
For Signora Vivanti the after-Easter season began under cheeriest
conditions. Her success at the Apollo had been unbroken. The longer
she acted a part, the more spirited her acting became. Ignorant and
uncultured as she was, she possessed the gift of “gag,” knew when and
where to introduce a word or a look which delighted her audience; and
the management and her brother and sister artists--more especially the
brothers--gave her full scope. These little inspirations of hers became
licensed liberties, and her _rôle_ grew and strengthened under her
hands. She was the most popular actress who had appeared at the Apollo
since the building of the theatre.
So at Easter the impresario increased the lady’s salary for the fourth
time since her _début_. He knew what tempting offers had been made
to her by managers and by agents--how eager one was to send her to
America, what dazzling lures another held out for Australasia. Happily,
la Vivanti liked London--big, dirty, bustling London--and was content
to make her fortune within the sound of Big Ben, whose mighty voice
came booming along the tide to Chelsea when the wind blew from the
Essex marshes and the German Ocean.
Lisa was making her fortune as fast as a young woman of moderate
desires could wish to make it. To herself she appeared inordinately
rich. The collet necklace had now a fine half-hoop bracelet to keep
it company in the strong box under Lisa’s bed, and she had a number
of brooches which studded her corsage like a constellation. What the
outside world said of Lisa’s diamonds was very different from the
truth; but the Venetian neither knew nor cared what the outside world
was saying. The people in the theatre were all very kind to her. They
knew that she was what Mr. Hawberk called “straight,” and that the gems
she flashed upon the public eye were honestly come by, the result of an
economical existence. She and la Zia were able to live upon so little.
A few shreds of meat, messed up in some occult manner with their
perpetual pasta, sufficed for dinner. A breakfast of coffee and rolls;
a supper of highly odorous cheese, with sometimes for a festa a dish of
cheap pastry from the Swiss confectioner’s in the King’s Road. Such a
cuisine did not make much impression upon Signora Vivanti’s salary. She
had no servant, except a slovenly female, with depressing manners, who
came two mornings a week to scrub floors, clean windows, and black-lead
grates. La Zia did all the rest, and delighted in her work. To sweep
and dust those palatial apartments was a perpetual joy to her, second
only to the delight of tramping up and down the King’s Road, exploring
every greengrocer’s shop till she secured the cheapest vegetables, and
lamenting the Rialto, where three lemons could be had for two soldi,
and where the pale, bloodless asparagus was less than a quarter the
London price of that luxury. Pleasant also was it to la Zia to take the
’bus for Coventry Street, and to prowl about the foreign settlement
between the churches of St. Anne and St. Giles; but oh, what a dull and
dismal aspect had the restaurants and _table d’hôtes_ in this quarter,
as compared with the Cappello Nero and the movement and brightness of
the Piazza.
La Zia was happy, but in spite of an altogether phenomenal success,
and of wealth that far surpassed her dreams of fortune, the same
could not be said of Fiordelisa. There was that lacking in her young
life which changed her gold to dross, her laurels to worthless weeds.
She had loved, and loved passionately, with all the force of her
undisciplined heart, and her love had been rejected. She had steeped
her soul in the promise of bliss, had told herself again and again that
the kindnesses she received from the man she loved could only be given
by a lover. Her notion of ethics was not exalted enough to comprehend
Vansittart’s desire to atone for a great wrong, or to understand that
so much gentleness and generosity could be lavished upon her by any one
less than a lover. She had built her soul a palace--not of art, but of
love--and when the unreal fabric fell her disappointment had been as
crushing as it was unforeseen.
After that passionate scene with Vansittart Lisa gave herself up to
the luxury of grief. For days she would hardly eat enough to sustain
life; for many nights she tossed sleepless on her bed, sobbing over
her vanished hopes, as an undisciplined child weeps for the loss of a
promised pleasure. It was only good little Tomaso Zinco’s strenuous
arguments which ultimately brought her to reason. La Zia could do
nothing with her. She turned her face to the wall, like David, and her
long blue-black hair was tangled with tossing on her pillow, and wet
with her passionate tears. She would not get up, or put on her clothes,
or even wash her face. It was her way of scattering ashes on her head,
and rending her garments. Her grief had all the fervid unreasonableness
of Oriental mourning.
La Zia was obliged to take the ’cello player into the bedroom, and show
him this spectacle of angry despair.
“He has deserted her--the father of her child,” muttered Zinco, in the
vestibule, as la Zia tried to explain the situation. “That is bad, bad,
bad. Very bad.”
“No, no,” said la Zia, shaking her head vehemently; “it is not that. He
has done no wrong. He has paid for her lessons, paid her rent, he has
done much for us. Only she loved him, and he did not love her. She is
like a child. She will not be consoled.”
Zinco nodded a vague assent, but did not believe the good aunt’s
assurance. Of course this man was the father of her child. Of course
she had been his mistress. He had brought her from Venice, and
established her in these comfortable lodgings, and now he was tired of
her. These things always end so. “Chi va all’acqua si bagna, e chi va a
cavallo cade.”
The good little Zinco crept into the room as softly as a cat, and
seated his stout and oily person by the bed, where Lisa was lying
face downwards, her tearful countenance buried in the pillow, and
nothing but a mass of tangled black hair visible above the gaudy
Mexican blanket. He gently patted her shoulder, which acknowledged the
attention with an angry shrug.
“Come, come, cara mia,” pleaded the singing-master. “Is not this a mere
childishness, to cry for the moon, when we have good fortune almost at
our feet? To cry because just one foolish young man among all the men
in the world is not wise enough to know that there is no more beautiful
woman than us in London! And not to eat, and not to sleep, and to cry
and sob all day and night. Ahimé, che bestia! This is just the very way
to lose our voice, to become mute as one of those nightingales whose
tongues were cut out to flavour the pasta for Vitellius. Was there ever
such foolishness? Were I a beautiful girl with a fine voice, I would be
queen of the world. If he has been cold and cruel show him what a pearl
he has lost. It is not by lying here and crying that you will bring him
to reason. Get up and dress yourself, and come to the piano. I’ll wager
you will not be able to take the upper C in ‘Roberto.’”
Lisa listened in sullen silence, but she did listen, and it seemed to
her that the words of Zinco were the words of wisdom. To lose her
voice--her voice which was her fortune--and to lose her good looks,
which alone had lifted her from the herd of peasants, living in penury,
toiling from sunrise to sunset, unknown and ill-clad, and dying uncared
for, save by creatures as poor and as hopeless as themselves! Yes,
Zinco was right; that would indeed be foolishness, and not the way to
win him whose love her sick soul longed for. Perhaps if she were a
public singer, and all the world admired her, he would admire her too.
He would see in the eyes of other men that she was handsome, and worthy
to be admired. He would hear on the lips of other men that she was
worthy of praise.
“I’ll get up,” she said, without lifting her tear-stained face from the
pillow. “Go into the sala and wait for me. I won’t be long. You shall
see I haven’t lost my voice.”
“Bene, benissimo, Si’ora,” cried the master, rubbing his fat little
hands, “now she speaks like a woman of spirit. She is not going to give
up the world for love, like Marc Antony at Actium.”
He shuffled off to the sitting-room, seated himself at the piano, and
began to play the symphony of “Una Voce” with that grandly decisive
style of a man who has played all his life in an orchestra. It was a
refreshment to Lisa’s weary spirit to hear that sparkling music, light,
gay, capricious as summer wavelets.
She joined her teacher at the piano in a much shorter time than a
young Englishwoman would have needed to complete her toilet, yet she
looked fresh enough in her southern beauty, and there were glittering
water-drops in her hair which gave a suggestion of a young river
goddess.
“Now, then, sir, play ‘Roberto’ and you will see if my voice is broken.”
She attacked the scena with wonderful dash and spirit, and was, in
sporting phraseology, winning easily till she came to that C in
alt--but here her voice snapped. She tried a second time, and a third
time--but the note was gone. She gave a cry of rage, and then burst
into tears.
“Ecco,” exclaimed Zinco, with a triumphant air, “that is what your
love-sick nonsense has done for you. You have been singing as false as
a prima donna at a _café chantant_ in the Boulevard St. Michel, and
your upper C is gone. It would have been worth £40 a week to you, but
you have thrown it away.”
At this; Lisa continued her lamentation, deeply sorry for herself.
“There’s no use in crying,” said Zinco; “that only makes things worse.
Bisogna sempre aver pazienza in questo mondo. You had better dry your
tears and eat a beefsteak--bleeding--and drink a pint of port-beer.
Malibran used to drink port-beer. In one of her great scenes she had
her quart pot on the stage, hidden behind a set piece--a rock, or what
not--and after her cavatina she would fall on the stage as if fainting,
and drag herself to the back of the rock and drink; ah, how she would
drink!”
“I don’t want to lose my voice,” sobbed Lisa, to whom Malibran was but
an empty name.
“No. Yet you go just the right way to lose it. Come, cheer up, Si’ora.
Eat much steaks, drink much stout, for the next three days. Andiamo
adagio. Don’t sing a note till I come next Saturday afternoon to give
you your lesson.”
Zinco’s policy prevailed. Lisa fretted sorely at the thought of losing
that voice which was to be her fortune. She had told herself in her
despair that fame and fortune would be useless without the man she
loved--that she had only wished to succeed as a singer in order to
please him. And now she began to see the situation in a new light. She
wanted to be admired and famous like the singers whom she had seen at
Covent Garden, curtsying behind a pile of bouquets, while the house
resounded with applause. She wanted to be applauded like those famous
singers, so that the cruel Smith might see her, and be sorry that
he had refused her his heart. Who could tell? Perhaps seeing her so
admired, hearing her voice ring clear and sweet through the theatre, he
might abandon his tuneless English sweetheart, and come back to Lisa,
come back as lover, as husband. Zinco had told her that a fashionable
prima donna could not look too high. She would have all London at her
feet. It would be for her to choose.
Lisa had a strong will, and a wonderful power of self-command when she
really wanted to command herself; so she dried her tears, ate British
beef, almost raw, and drank British stout; and under this régime her
nerves speedily recovered from the rude shaking which passion had given
them, and when the good little ’cello player came to give her the
Saturday lesson, her voice rang out sound as a bell, and B natural was
produced with perfect ease--a round and perfect note.
“We’ll wait till next Tuesday for the C,” said Zinco, “and we won’t try
‘Roberto’ for a week or so. Stick to the Solfeggi.”
“And I have not lost my voice, caro?”
“No more than I have lost a thousand pounds, poveretta.”
After this things went smoothly. Life seemed very dreary to Fiordelisa
without the friend whose rare visits had been her delight; but her mind
was braced and fortified by a steady purpose. She meant to win the
great British public; and behind that indefinite monster there shone
the image of the man she loved. He would go to the theatre where she
sang. He would see her, and understand at last that she was beautiful
and gifted, and worthy to be loved.
“And then he knows that I love him with all the strength of my heart,”
she said to herself. “That ought to count for something. Yet when I
told him of my love he shrank from me, as if he hated me for loving
him. That is his cold English nature, perhaps. An Englishman does not
like unasked love.”
* * * * *
Lisa was two years older than in that day of despair, and Zinco’s
promises had been realized. She had the town at her feet; and if the
coronet matrimonial had not yet been laid there she had received plenty
of that adulation and of those advances which cannot be accepted
without peril. All such advances Lisa had repulsed with a splendid
scorn. Carriages, servants, West End apartments, and St. John’s Wood
villas had been offered her; but she still rode in penny omnibuses or
twopenny steamers, or trudged valiantly in cheap shoes. She might have
had an open account with any silk mercer in London. She might have had
her frocks made by the dressmaker on the crest of fashion’s changeful
wave--but she was content to wear a black stuff gown, with a bit of
bright ribbon tied round her neck, and another bit twisted in her hair.
When she wanted to look her best she put on her bead necklace--one
of those necklaces which the man she loved bought for her in the
Procuratie Vecchie on that fatal night. The idea that he had bought the
murderous dagger at the same shop in no wise lessened her pleasure in
these gifts of his.
Among her numerous admirers one only had been received by the lady and
her aunt, and that was Wilfred Sefton, who had contrived to establish
a footing in the Signora’s drawing-room before Zinco could protest
against his admission. He had so managed as to be regarded as a friend
by both aunt and niece, and the boy, whom he detested, had grown
odiously fond of him. He had known Lisa for a year and a half, had
seen her often, had spent long summer days in her company, and in all
that time he had never addressed her as a lover. He knew, too well,
from many a subtle sign and token, that his going or coming affected
her not at all; that she liked him and welcomed him only because his
presence and his attentions made a pleasant variety in the dulness
of her domestic life. He knew this. He knew that whatever she might
have been in the past, she was a virtuous woman in the present, that
she courted no man’s admiration, and was tempted by no man’s gold.
Convinced of this, finding her as remote in her quiet indifference
as if she had been some young patrician pacing her ancestral park
in maiden meditation, fancy free, his desire to win her intensified
until she seemed to him the only woman in the world worth winning. Had
she been easily won he might have been tired of her before now. His
grandes passions in the past had been of short duration. Unspeakable
weariness had descended upon him as a blight; the loathing of life and
all it could yield him. Lisa’s indifference gave a piquancy to their
relations. He told himself that he could afford to bide his time. He
had done a good deal of mischief in the world; but he was not a vulgar
profligate. His love was an unscrupulous but not a vulgar love.
* * * * *
The white kitten, a thoroughbred Persian, and a gift from Mrs. Hawberk,
had grown into a great white cat, stolid, beautiful, resentful of
strange caresses, but devotedly attached to Lisa and her boy. He was
called Marco, after the patron saint of Venice; and he looked like the
white cat of fairy tale, who might be transformed at any moment into
Prince Charming.
By the time Marco had grown up Mr. Sefton had made himself accepted as
a trusted and familiar friend, and in this season of ripening spring,
when the lilacs and laburnums filled the suburban gardens with perfume
and colour, and when the hawthorn bushes were beginning to break into
clusters of scented blossom here and there, it was his business and his
pleasure to afford some glimpses of a fairer world to the little family
at Chelsea.
The holiday which Fiordelisa and her belongings most enjoyed was a day
on the river. They would have taken boat at Chelsea, if Sefton had
allowed them, and would have been content to be rowed to Hammersmith
Bridge; but he insisted on introducing them to Father Thames under a
fairer aspect; so they usually took the train to Richmond, and from
Richmond Bridge Sefton rowed them to Kingston or Hampton, where they
lunched at some quiet inn, and sat in some rustic inn garden, or
sauntered in those lovely old Palace gardens by the river, till it was
time to go back to the boat and the train. Sefton was too punctual
and business-like to permit any risk of the singer’s non-appearance.
He took care that Lisa should always be at the Apollo in time for her
work.
These days were very delightful to him, even in spite of Paolo, whose
attentions were sometimes boring. Happily, Paolo loved the water
with an instinctive hereditary passion, the instinct of amphibious
ancestors, born and bred on a level with the lagunes--reared half on
sea and half on land. It was amusement enough for him to sit in the
stern of the skiff and dabble a bare arm in the stream, or to watch
the little paper boats which la Zia made for him, or the great white
swans which hissed menaces at him with horizontal necks as they paddled
slowly by, sacrificing grace and stateliness to unreasoning anger.
Sefton put up with Paolo, and was happy in the society of two ignorant
women, delighting in Lisa’s _naïveté_, finding a delicious originality
in all her remarks upon life and the world she lived in, her stories of
green-room quarrels and side-scene flirtations. Talk which might have
sounded silly and vulgar in English was fascinating in Italian--all the
more fascinating in that Venetian dialect which so languidly slurred
the syllables, lazily dropping the consonants, and which had in its
soft elisions something childlike that touched Sefton’s fancy. He took
pleasure in Lisa’s talk almost as if she had been a child, while those
sudden flashes of shrewdness, natural to the peasant of all countries,
assured him that she was no fool.
He thought of Emma Hamilton, and wondered whether the charm which held
Nelson till the hour of death, and made his Emma the last thought when
life grew dim, were some such childlike spontaneous charm as this of
Lisa’s, the charm of unsophisticated womanhood, adapted to no universal
pattern, cut and polished in no social diamond-mill.
Yes, she had charmed him in their first interview, sitting out in the
chilly tent, amidst the glimmer of fairy lamps. She charmed him still,
after a year and a half of familiar friendship. She, the ignorant
and low-born; he, the modern worldling, who had touched the highest
culture at every point, strained his intellect to reach every goal,
measured himself against every theory of life here and hereafter, and
found happiness nowhere. She pleased him all the more because she was
not a lady, and made none of the demands which the modern lady makes
over-strenuously--the demand to be treated as a boon companion and yet
worshipped as a goddess; the demand of your money, your mind, your
time, your wit, your trouble. Lisa had no idea of women’s rights, and
she was grateful for the simplest festa which her admirer offered her.
Never had a grande passion cost him so little. This girl, who had
worked in the lace factory at Burano for a few pence per day, and had
lived mostly on polenta, sternly refused anything in the shape of a
gift, even to a bunch of flowers, if she thought they were costly.
“I like the cheap flowers best,” she said, “the blue and yellow ones
that they sell in the streets, or the great red poppies la Zia buys,
which flame in the fireplace, ever so much brighter than a real fire.”
Often, in a casual way, he had tried to make her talk of Vansittart,
but in vain. She would say nothing about him, yet she was curious to
know all that Sefton could tell her about the man with whom he had seen
her talking. Sefton took his revenge by a studious reticence.
“Yes, I know the man,” he said, when the subject was mooted in the
early days of their acquaintance.
“Do you know him intimately? Is he your friend?”
“No.”
“You look and speak as if you did not like him.”
“I look and speak as I feel.”
“Why don’t you like him?” urged Lisa.
“Who knows? We all have our likings and our antipathies.”
“But if he has never injured you----”
“That is a negative merit. I dislike a good many people who have never
done me any harm.”
“He is going to be married, I hear.”
“He is married. He was married last summer.”
“Do you know his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Not so beautiful as you; but she has a complexion like the inside of
a sea-shell. You know those pale shells, almost transparent, with a
rosy flush that is less a colour than a light. She has pale gold hair,
which shines round her low, broad forehead like a nimbus in one of Fra
Angelica’s pictures of Virgins and angels. She is rather like an old
Italian picture, of that early school which chose a golden-haired ideal
and left your glowing Southern beauty out in the cold. She is not so
handsome as you, bellissima.”
“Yet he liked her better than he liked me. What is the good of my being
handsome? He did not care,” said Lisa, passionately.
It was the first time she had betrayed herself to Sefton. He smiled,
and glanced from the mother’s angry face to the boy, who was hanging
about her knee, unconsciously reproducing the attitude of many an
infant St. John.
“Yes, there can be no doubt,” he told himself, “Vansittart is the man
she loved, and this brat must be Vansittart’s offspring.”
Lady Hartley had told him that her brother had been a rambler in Italy
and the Tyrol for years before her marriage.