So at Easter the impresario increased the lady’s salary for the fourth time since her début. He knew what tempting offers had been made to her by managers and by agents—how eager one was to send her to America, what dazzling lures another held out for Australasia. Happily, la Vivanti liked London—big, dirty, bustling London—and was content to make her fortune within the sound of Big Ben, whose mighty voice came booming along the tide to Chelsea when the wind blew from the Essex marshes and the German Ocean.
Lisa was making her fortune as fast as a young woman of moderate desires could wish to make it. To herself she appeared inordinately rich. The collet necklace had now a fine half-hoop bracelet to keep it company in the strong box under Lisa’s bed, and she had a number of brooches which studded her corsage like a constellation. What the outside world said of Lisa’s diamonds was very different from the truth; but the Venetian neither knew nor cared what the outside world was saying. The people in the theatre were all very kind to her. They knew that she was what Mr. Hawberk called “straight,” and that the gems she flashed upon the public eye were honestly come by, the result of an economical existence. She and la Zia were able to live upon so little. A few shreds of meat, messed up in some occult manner with their perpetual pasta, sufficed for dinner. A breakfast of coffee and rolls; a supper of highly odorous cheese, with sometimes for a festa a dish of cheap pastry from the Swiss confectioner’s in the King’s Road. Such a cuisine did not make much impression upon Signora Vivanti’s salary. She had no servant, except a slovenly female, with depressing manners, who came two mornings a week to scrub floors, clean windows, and black-lead grates. La Zia did all the rest, and delighted in her work. To sweep and dust those palatial apartments was a perpetual joy to her, second only to the delight of tramping up and down the King’s Road, exploring every greengrocer’s shop till she secured the cheapest vegetables, and lamenting the Rialto, where three lemons could be had for two soldi, and where the pale, bloodless asparagus was less than a quarter the London price of that luxury. Pleasant also was it to la Zia to take the ’bus for Coventry Street, and to prowl about the foreign settlement between the churches of St. Anne and St. Giles; but oh, what a dull and dismal aspect had the restaurants and table d’hôtes in this quarter, as compared with the Cappello Nero and the movement and brightness of the Piazza.
La Zia was happy, but in spite of an altogether phenomenal success, and of wealth that far surpassed her dreams of fortune, the same could not be said of Fiordelisa. There was that lacking in her young life which changed her gold to dross, her laurels to worthless weeds. She had loved, and loved passionately, with all the force of her undisciplined heart, and her love had been rejected. She had steeped her soul in the promise of bliss, had told herself again and again that the kindnesses she received from the man she loved could only be given by a lover. Her notion of ethics was not exalted enough to comprehend Vansittart’s desire to atone for a great wrong, or to understand that so much gentleness and generosity could be lavished upon her by any one less than a lover. She had built her soul a palace—not of art, but of love—and when the unreal fabric fell her disappointment had been as crushing as it was unforeseen.
After that passionate scene with Vansittart Lisa gave herself up to the luxury of grief. For days she would hardly eat enough to sustain life; for many nights she tossed sleepless on her bed, sobbing over her vanished hopes, as an undisciplined child weeps for the loss of a promised pleasure. It was only good little Tomaso Zinco’s strenuous arguments which ultimately brought her to reason. La Zia could do nothing with her. She turned her face to the wall, like David, and her long blue-black hair was tangled with tossing on her pillow, and wet with her passionate tears. She would not get up, or put on her clothes, or even wash her face. It was her way of scattering ashes on her head, and rending her garments. Her grief had all the fervid unreasonableness of Oriental mourning.
La Zia was obliged to take the ’cello player into the bedroom, and show him this spectacle of angry despair.
“He has deserted her—the father of her child,” muttered Zinco, in the vestibule, as la Zia tried to explain the situation. “That is bad, bad, bad. Very bad.”
“No, no,” said la Zia, shaking her head vehemently; “it is not that. He has done no wrong. He has paid for her lessons, paid her rent, he has done much for us. Only she loved him, and he did not love her. She is like a child. She will not be consoled.”
Zinco nodded a vague assent, but did not believe the good aunt’s assurance. Of course this man was the father of her child. Of course she had been his mistress. He had brought her from Venice, and established her in these comfortable lodgings, and now he was tired of her. These things always end so. “Chi va all’acqua si bagna, e chi va a cavallo cade.”
The good little Zinco crept into the room as softly as a cat, and seated his stout and oily person by the bed, where Lisa was lying face downwards, her tearful countenance buried in the pillow, and nothing but a mass of tangled black hair visible above the gaudy Mexican blanket. He gently patted her shoulder, which acknowledged the attention with an angry shrug.
“Come, come, cara mia,” pleaded the singing-master. “Is not this a mere childishness, to cry for the moon, when we have good fortune almost at our feet? To cry because just one foolish young man among all the men in the world is not wise enough to know that there is no more beautiful woman than us in London! And not to eat, and not to sleep, and to cry and sob all day and night. Ahimé, che bestia! This is just the very way to lose our voice, to become mute as one of those nightingales whose tongues were cut out to flavour the pasta for Vitellius. Was there ever such foolishness? Were I a beautiful girl with a fine voice, I would be queen of the world. If he has been cold and cruel show him what a pearl he has lost. It is not by lying here and crying that you will bring him to reason. Get up and dress yourself, and come to the piano. I’ll wager you will not be able to take the upper C in ‘Roberto.’”