His heart was unmoved by this sensuous, eager, earthly loveliness. Her vulgarity, all her words and gestures essentially of the people, interested him, yet kept him worlds away from her.
He was rich, idle, alone in Venice, and he thought it was his right to amuse himself to the uttermost at this Carnival season. That offer of a cup of coffee, arising out of mutual laughter at some absurdities among the crowd, had been the beginning of the friendliest relations.
He strolled on the loose, level sands with Lisa and her aunt, those sands over which Byron used to ride, the poet of whose existence Lisa had never heard, yet who had wasted lightest hours with just such girls as Lisa. And then how could he go back to Venice alone in his gondola and leave this black-eyed girl and her chaperon to struggle for standing room among the crowd on the twopenny steamer, in their fine clothes and jewels, those jewels in which lower-class Venetians love to invest their savings? No; it was the most natural thing in life to offer them seats in his gondola, and then to see the fun of the Grand Canal in their company; and what young man with his note-case plethoric with limp Italian notes, and a reserve of English bank-notes in a close-buttoned inside pocket, could refrain from offering dinner, and then, hearing that Lisa was pining to go to the opera, a box at that entertainment? No sooner had she expressed her desire, while they were on the Grand Canal, than he sent off a Venetian guide, whom he knew of old, to engage a stage box for the evening.
Fiordelisa told him about her life at Burano, while she devoured her pastry, the aunt listening placidly, replete with dinner and wine, caring for nothing except that those old days were a thing of the past, and that neither she nor her handsome niece need toil or starve any more—not for the present, at any rate; perhaps never. La Zia was not a woman to peer curiously into the future while the present gave her a comfortable lodging and meat and drink.
The girl talked her Venetian, and Vansittart, who had spent most of his holidays in Italy, and had a quick ear for dialects, was able to understand her. Now and then she spoke English, better than he would have expected from her youthful ignorance.
“How is it that you can talk English, Signorina mia, and how is it that you left Burano?” he asked in Italian.
“For one and the same reason. A young English gentleman fell in love with me, and brought my aunt and me to Venice, and is having me educated, in order to marry me and take me to England with him.”
Vansittart did not believe in the latter half of the story, but he was too polite to express his doubt.
“Oh, you are being educated up to our idea of the British matron, are you, bella mia?” he said, smiling at her, as she wiped her coral lips with the coarse serviette, and flung herself back in her chair, satiated with cream and pastry. “And pray in what does the education consist?”
“I am learning to play on the mandoline. A little old man with a cracked voice comes to our lodgings twice a week to teach me—and we sing duets, ‘La ci darem’ and ‘Sul aria.’”