The Venetians

by M. E. Braddon

Sefton was passionately fond of music, and knew more about it than is known to most country gentlemen. The loftiest classical school was not too high or too serious for him; and the lightest opera bouffe was not too low. He had a taste sufficiently catholic to range from Wagner to Offenbach. He was a profound believer in Sullivan, and he had a warm affection for Massenet.

Fanchonette was by far the cleverest opera which Mervyn Hawberk had written; and Sefton was at the Apollo on the opening night, charmed with the music, and amused by the new singer. He went a second, a third, a fourth time during his fortnight in town; and the oftener he heard the music the better he liked it; and the oftener he saw Signora Vivanti the more vividly was he impressed by her undisciplined graces of person and manner. She had just that spontaneity which had ever exercised the strongest influence over his mind and fancy. He had passed unmoved through the furnace of the best society, had danced and flirted, and had been on the best possible terms with some of the handsomest women in London, and had yet remained heart-whole. He had never been so near falling in love in all seriousness as with Eve Marchant; and Eve’s chief charm had been her frank girlishness, her unsophisticated delight in life.

Well, he was cured of his passion for Eve, cured by that cold douche of indifference which the young lady had poured upon him; cured by the feeling of angry scorn which had been evoked by her preference for Vansittart; for a man who, in worldly position, in good looks, and in culture, Wilfred Sefton regarded as his inferior. He could not go on caring for a young woman who had shown herself so deficient in taste as not to prefer the dubious advances of a Sefton to the honest love of a Vansittart. He dismissed Eve from his thoughts for the time being; but not without prophetic musings upon a day when she might be wearied of her commonplace husband, and more appreciative of Mr. Sefton’s finer qualities of intellect and person. He was thus in a measure fancy free as he lolled in his stall at the Apollo, and listened approvingly to Lisa’s full and bell-like tones in the quartette, which was already being played on all the barrel-organs in London, a quartette in which the composer had borrowed the dramatic form of the famous quartette in Rigoletto, and adapted it to a serio-comic situation. He was free to admire this exuberant Italian beauty, free to pursue a divinity whom he judged an easy conquest. He and the composer were old friends—Hawberk being a familiar figure at all artistic gatherings in the artistic suburb of Chelsea—and from the composer Sefton had heard something of the new prima donna’s history. He had been told that she was a daughter of the Venetian people, a lace-maker from one of the islands; that she had come to London with her aunt, to seek her fortune; and that her musical training had been accomplished within the space of a year, under the direction of Signor Zinco, the fat little Italian who played the ’cello at the Apollo.

Such a history did not suggest inaccessible beauty, and there was a touch of originality in it which awakened Sefton’s interest. The very name of Venice is a sound of enchantment for some minds; and Sefton, although a man of the world, was not without romantic yearnings. He was always glad to escape from beaten tracks.

He had been troubled and perplexed from the night of Signora Vivanti’s début by the conviction that he had seen that brilliant face before, and by the inability to fix the when or the where. Yes, that vivid countenance was decidedly familiar. It was the individual and not the type which he knew—but where and when—where and when? The brain did its work in the usual unconscious way, and one night, sitting lazily in his stall, dreamily watching the scene, and the actress whose image seemed to fill the stage to the exclusion of all other figures, the memory of a past rencontre flashed suddenly upon the dreamer. The face was the face of the foreign girl he had seen on the Chelsea Embankment, hanging upon Vansittart’s arm.

“By Heaven, there is something fatal in it,” thought Sefton. “Are the threads always to cross in the web of our lives? He has worsted me with Eve; and now—now am I to fall in love with his cast-off mistress?”

He had been quick to make inferences from that little scene on the Embankment; the girl hanging on Vansittart’s arm, looking up at him pleadingly, passionately. What could such a situation mean but a love affair of the most serious kind?

Had there been any doubt in Sefton’s mind as to the nature of the intrigue, Vansittart’s evident embarrassment would have settled the question. Mr. Sefton was the kind of man who always thinks worst about everybody, and prejudice had predisposed him to think badly of Eve’s admirer.

This idea of the singer’s probable relations with Vansittart produced a strong revulsion of feeling. An element of scorn was now mixed with his admiration of the lovely Venetian. Until now he had approached her with deference, sending her a bouquet every evening, with his card, but making no other advance. But the day after his discovery he sent her a diamond bracelet, and asked with easy assurance to be allowed to call upon her.

The bracelet was returned to him, with a stately letter signed Zinco; a letter wherein the ’cello player begged that his pupil might be spared the annoyance of gifts, which she could but consider as insults in disguise.