“Yes. Your English names are very ugly, and very difficult to remember. They are so short; so insignificant.”
And then she told him the history of her diamonds; how the manager of the Apollo had first doubled, and then trebled, and quadrupled her salary; how she had kept the money in her trunk, all in gold, sovereigns upon sovereigns, and how she and her aunt had counted the gold every week, and how only last Saturday she and la Zia had gone off in a cab to Piccadilly, with a bag full of gold, and had bought the diamonds, which were now shining on Fiordelisa’s throat.
“We had less than half the price of the necklace,” concluded Lisa, “but when the jeweller heard who I was, he insisted that I should take it away with me, and pay him by degrees, just as I find convenient, so I shall pay him my salary every Saturday until I am out of debt.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” said Sefton. “Do you and your aunt live upon rose leaves and dew, Signora; or how is it that you can afford to invest all your earnings in diamonds?”
“Oh, we have other money,” answered Lisa, with a defiant glance at the questioner. “I need not sing unless I like.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Sefton, strengthened in his conviction that Signora Vivanti was not altogether so “straight” as Hawberk believed, or affected to believe.
Mr. Sefton was not so confiding as the composer. He was a man prone to think badly of women, and he was inclined to think the worst of this brilliant Venetian, much as he admired her. He followed her like a shadow for the rest of the evening, escorted her up the narrow staircase, and stood near the piano while she sang, and then took her from the stifling atmosphere of the lamp-lit house to the semi-darkness of the garden, which Mrs. Hawberk had converted into a tent, shutting out the wintry sky, and enclosing the miniature lawn and surrounding shrubbery; a tent dimly lighted with fairy lamps, nestling among the foliage. Here he sat talking with Lisa in a shadowy corner, while three or four other couples murmured and whispered in other nooks and corners, and while Hawberk, feeling he had done his duty as host, smoked and drank whisky and soda with a little group of chosen friends—an actor, a journalist, a playwright, and a brace of musical critics, who had an inexhaustible flow of speech, and a delicious unconsciousness of time.
Sefton too was unconscious of time, talking with Lisa in that soft Italian tongue, having to bend his head very near the full red lips in order to catch the Venetian elisions, the gentle, sliding syllables.
The hum of voices, the occasional ripples of laughter, the music and song, dwindled and died into silence—even the lights in the lower windows grew dim, and gradually Sefton awakened to the fact that the party was at an end, and that he and Signora Vivanti, and Hawberk’s Bohemian group yonder, were all that remained of Mrs. Hawberk’s musical evening. He bent down to look at his watch by one of the fairy lamps.
Three o’clock.