“And you left Italy without revisiting Venice?” exclaimed Maud, who had often listened to his raptures about the City by the Sea.
There was no more to be said. For the first time in his life he had deliberately lied, and to his mother and sister, of all people—to those who in all the world most trusted and believed in him. He hated himself for what he had done; and yet he meant to maintain that false assertion doggedly. He had not been to Venice. Let no casual acquaintance come forward to allege that he had been seen there. In the very teeth of assertion he would declare that in this springtime of 1886 he had not been in Venice. He rejoiced in the thought that he had told his name to no one at Danieli’s, and that he had entered the hotel as a stranger, having stopped at one of the hotels on the Grand Canal on his previous visits. He told himself that no one could convict him of having been in the fatal city last Shrove Tuesday—no one who knew him as Jack Vansittart.
“And now that you’ve had the history of my travels——”
“A sorry history, forsooth!” cried Maud. “You men have no capacity for description. When Lucy Calder came home from her Italian honeymoon she talked to me for hours about the places and things she had seen there.”
“Pretty prattler! Would you like me to recite a few pages of Murray or Joanne? All travelling is alike nowadays, Maud, and pleasure and comfort are only a question of good railway service and well-found hotels. We have done with romance and adventure. Life is pretty much the same all over Europe. And now tell me what you have been doing; there is more interest in a girl’s life in her first season than in all the cities of Europe.”
“Well, Jack, to begin with, I was presented at the February Drawing-Room. I went out with mother a goodish bit last November, don’t you know, but I was not actually out. That only began after the Drawing-Room.”
“And had you a pretty frock, and did the Royalties look kindly at you when you made your curtsy?”
“The Royalties might all have been waxwork, from Her Majesty downwards, for anything I knew to the contrary,” said Maud. “I saw no faces—only a cloud of feathers, and a splendour of jewels, and velvet, and satin, all vague and troubled, like the figures in a dream—but I got through the business somehow, and mother said I made no mistakes.”
“And the frock?”
“Oh, the frock was just as pretty as a frock can be. It was mother’s taste. She talked out every detail with Mdlle. Marie. She was not content to hear that Lady Lucille Plantagenet had worn this sort of thing, or Lady Gwendoline Tudor that sort of thing. She insisted on having just the frock she thought would suit me, Maud Vansittart. The train and petticoat were white satin—the satin you see in old pictures, satin in which there are masses of deep, steel-grey shadow and floods of white, silvery light—and then there was a cloud of aerophane arranged as only Marie can arrange a drapery, and in the cloud there were clusters of lilies of the valley and fluffy ostrich tips. The papers—the lady-papers mostly—went into raptures about my frock.”