Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!
The famous song of Naples.
“This is heaven,” says she, when the voice was silent, “and you and your Emma trouble yourselves about the weary world! Oh, fools, fools! Forgive me, my good cousin!”
Indeed, it was with a beating heart that Emma prepared for that introduction. Not even to Sir William would she admit how much it signified to her. He viewed it but as the caprice of a lady too great to be crossed. She, as the golden key which might possibly unlock another of the endless gates which stayed her progress. Yet she betrayed no eagerness, no agitation, though it awakened every intelligence to its work. “What would I not do for any relative of my own Sir William’s,” was all she said when it was laid before her.
But her preparations! She had resolved that she would wear the dress in which the Attitudes should be performed, and indeed it served her well. Had she known her business completely she would never have been seen in anything else.
Behold, then, the Duchess of Argyll’s salon in the Villa Columbaia, high, cool and beautiful with the grace of Italian and the comfort of English furnishings. A naked girl in marble, carved by a famous Italian, poised life-size by the windows, running; caught in the flush of her speed with a butterfly perched on her finger.
The Duchess herself sat in a noble chair carved long ago by English workmen, and above her head was a picture of her sister, the dead Lady Coventry, seductive, entrancing, with her long languid eyes. She herself, in an Italian evening gown of purple lustring trimmed with silver gauze, harmonized the incongruities with an odd but delightful unity. There was beside her a great stand of tall and shaded wax candles which shed the most flattering light known to the imagination on her beautiful worn face, and the great bowl of luscious roses at her elbow.
There was only a small party in attendance (for all present had the air of attending her Grace): three or four men, the Lady Diana Beauclerck, the Duke and Duchess de St. Maître and a few more; Lady Diana, sketchbook in hand, for she would never lose the chance of some new and surprising pose of Emma’s.
To these, talking and laughing, the lacquey makes his unashamed announcement.
“His Excellency the Ambassador and Mrs. Hart.” And the Duchess beholds framed in the tall dim doorway—what? A statue from the Museo come to pay her respects? No, a somewhat tall young woman robed in pure white of some subtly soft material which drapes like Greek marble, and falls in long slender folds to chastely hidden but sandalled feet. Chastely hidden the beautiful bosom also, rounding softly through the veil, but the noble throat, a pillar of ivory, rears itself proudly from the uncovered chest as strongly and finely modelled as that of Diana’s swiftest nymph, with room and to spare for ample lungs and untroubled breath. The sleeve is looped to the shoulder on one side, and falls in long drapery on the other. Her face, a little pale with controlled agitation, is serenely sweet and modest. A magnificent young animal in rejoicing health, if no more, thinks the Duchess as Sir William leads the beauty forward and she makes her reverence before the thronelike chair. Her Grace may then remark the masses of gold-touched bronze hair pressed and calmed down upon the small head that its luxuriance may be controlled into reason, and the rose-red lips above the perfect chin. The eyes are not on show. Mrs. Hart veils them chastely with long lashes. She showed like a lovely survival of the lost glory of Greece among these fashionably dressed ladies—and knew it. The Duchess received her graciously and motioned that a chair be set beside her. Sir William should have nothing to complain of and, indeed, she was curious herself.