IN THE BLUE CHAMBER.
Eve had learnt Madame Vivanti’s address from Lady Hartley the day after the singer’s appearance in Hill Street. So her letter to her husband written, and her mind made up, she had only to drive to Don Saltero’s Mansion, and to make her way to that upper floor in which the singer had her bower. The door was opened by Fiordelisa herself, who gave a little look of surprise at seeing her visitor, and then stood in mute wonder, waiting for Eve to speak, smiling faintly, and evidently embarrassed.
She wore her accustomed black stuff gown, with a yellow silk handkerchief knotted carelessly on her breast. The boy was hanging on to her gown, and peeping shyly at the strange lady, so pure and fresh looking in her soft grey silk, and dainty grey hat with pale pink roses. Lisa noted her rival’s toilette in all its details, the long loose grey gloves, the grey parasol.
For a minute or so the two women stood thus, looking at each other in silence. Then, with an effort, Eve spoke.
“Are you alone, Madame Vivanti?”
“Alone, all but Paolo, and I don’t suppose you count him anybody, Eccellenza. La Zia has gone to London.”
“I have come to talk to you—about my husband.”
Lisa flushed crimson.
“Please take the trouble to sit down, Eccellenza,” she said politely, placing her prettiest armchair in front of the open window.
There were flowers in the balcony, a bed of marigolds, a flower which la Zia had discovered to be decorative and cheap. For perfume there were stocks and mignonette. The balcony was wide enough to hold plenty of flowers, and a couple of basket chairs in which Lisa and her aunt sat for many idle hours in fine weather, breathing the cool breezes from the river, and submitting to the blacks. They thought of their attic window in the Campo, and the life and movement in the paved square below, the passing and repassing of the light-hearted crowd to and fro on the Rialto, the twanging of a guitar now and then, the tinkling of wiry mandolines, the nasal tones of a street-singer. Here they had a wider horizon, but a murkier sky, and not that concentration of gaiety which makes every campo in Venice a busy little world, self-contained and self-sufficing. Eve looked round the room, noting the pretty furniture, obviously chosen by a person of taste; the open piano; the glimpse of a somewhat untidy bedroom through a door ajar. Her husband had chosen the furniture, Eve told herself. He had built this nest for his singing-bird.