“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.