“Shall I take you to the ball, Lisa?” asked Vansittart, as they came out of the heat and the glare into the cool softness of a Venetian night.
“No, I don’t care about dancing. I only care for the opera. The girls at Burano were mad about dancing, but I liked to hear the organ at High Mass better than all their dances.”
Vansittart thought of bidding his new friends good night at the door of the theatre. Had Venice not been Venice, and had there been any vehicles in waiting, he would have put his fair companions into a coach, paid their fare, and bade them good night for ever, without so much as inquiring where they lived. But Venice has a romantic unlikeness to every other city. There was no coach. To say good night and leave them to walk home unescorted was out of the question.
“In which direction is your house, Signora?” he asked the elder lady.
“Oh, we are not going home,” cried Fiordelisa. “We are going to the Piazza. This is the time when there will be most fun. You’ll take us, won’t you?” she asked, slipping her hand through his arm, and boldly taking possession of him. “Come, come, aunt, we are going to the Piazza.”
Her feet threaded the narrow ways so swiftly that Vansittart scarcely knew by which particular windings of the labyrinth they came to the Bocca di Piazza, and emerged from the shadow of the pillars upon the broad open square, all aflame with lamps and lanterns, and one roar of multitudinous voices, squeaking punchinellos, barking dogs, blaring trumpets, tinkling guitars. They pushed their way through the crowd, the two women masked, each hanging on to his arm, and making progress difficult.
The Piazza was a spectacle to remember, full of life and movement, a military band braying out brazen music, music of Offenbach, loud, martial, insistent, above the multifarious squeakings and shoutings, the laughter and the clamour of the crowd. In the long colonnades the throng pushed thickly; but Vansittart had been one of the strong men of the ’Varsity, a thrower of hammers, a jumper of long jumps, a man with a name that was famous at Lillie Bridge as well as at Oxford. He parted the throng as if it had been water, and would have made his way quickly to the brightest, largest, and gayest of the caffès, if it had not been for Lisa, who hung back to look at the lighted shop windows, windows that she could have seen any night of her life, but which had a particular attraction at Carnival time.
The touters were touting at the shop doors, with that smiling persistence which makes the Procuratie Vecchie odious, and recalls Cranbourne Alley in the dark ages. Lisa made a dead stop before a shop where gaudy wooden figures of Moorish slaves, garish with crude colour and much gilding, were grilling in the glare of the gas. It was a kind of bazaar, half Venetian, half Oriental, and one window was full of bead necklaces and barbaric jewels. At these Lisa looked with such childish longing eyes that Vansittart would have been hard as a stone if he had not suggested making a selection from that sparkling display of rainbow glass and enamel.
The spider at the door was entreating the flies to go into his web, a young Venetian with smiling black eyes and a Jewish nose—a lineal descendant of Jessica, perhaps—a very agreeable young spider, entreating the Signora and Signorina to go in and look about them. There would be no necessity for them to buy. “To look costs nothing.”
They all three went in. Fiordelisa fastened upon a tray of jewels, and lost herself in a bewilderment as to which of all those earrings, brooches, and necklaces she most desired. Vansittart was interested in the Moorish things—the bronze cups, the gold and scarlet slippers, the embroidered curtains, and, most of all, the daggers, of which there were many curious shapes, in purple-gleaming Damascus steel.