“Oh, his professional name is Meryon, of course. He is billed as that and known all the world over, though he only began to play in public three years ago when his wife left him. She was always a horrid woman, and she made him marry her when he was quite a boy, they say. They say he plays to forget things as other men take to drink. He has been twice to New York, and I know a girl who says he gave her a lock of his hair, but I don’t believe her. It is dark brown, almost black, but I guess she cut it off a switch. He’s not that kind.”
Olive said nothing.
“You need not stay if you don’t want to,” Mamie said unceremoniously. “Be ready to come down after dinner. I might want you to play my accompaniments.”
“I can’t think why you say she won’t do,” cried Edna when she was gone out of the room. “I call her perfectly sweet. Rather sad-looking, but just lovely.”
Mamie sniffed. “Glad you admire her,” she said.
The governess was expected to appear at luncheon, but dinner was served to her in her own room, where she must sit in solitary state, dressed in her best and waiting for a summons, until eleven o’clock, when she might assume that she would not be wanted and go to bed. This evening Olive lingered rather anxiously over her dressing, trying to make the best of herself, since it seemed that she was really to come down to-night into the yellow drawing-room where she spent so many weary hours of a morning listening to Mamie scraping her Strad while the German who was supposed to teach her possessed his soul in patience. She put on her black silk dress. It was a guinea robe bought at a sale in Oxford Street the year before, a reach-me-down garment for women to sneer at and men to describe vaguely as something dark, and she hated the poor thing.
Most women believe that the men who like them in cotton frocks would adore them in cloth of gold, and are convinced that the secret of Cleopatra’s charm lay in her extensive wardrobe.
Avenel. It had shocked Olive to hear his name uttered by alien lips, as it hurt her to suppose that he came often to the Palazzo Lorenzoni. She would not suppose it, and, indeed, nothing that Mamie had said could lead her to think that he was a friend of the family. They had clutched at him greedily, and he had repaid with an impertinence. That was all.
The third footman, whose duty it was to attend upon her, brought two covered dishes on a tray at eight o’clock, and soon after nine he came again to fetch her.
There was a superabundance of gorgeous lackeys in the corridors that had been dusty and deserted five years before, and a gigantic Suisse stood always on guard now outside the palace gates. The Marchesa would have liked to have had outriders in her scarlet livery when she went out driving in the streets of Florence, but her husband warned her that some mad anarchist might take her for the Queen, and so she contented herself with a red racing motor. The millions old Whittaker had made availed to keep his widow and the man who had given her a title in almost regal state. They entertained largely, and the Via Tornabuoni was often blocked with the carriages and motors that brought their guests. Olive, sitting alone in her chilly bedroom, mending her stockings or trying to read, heard voices and laughter as the doors opened—harsh Florentine and high English voices, and the shrill sounds of American mirth—night after night. But the Lorenzoni dined en famille sometimes, as even marquises and millionaires may do, and there were but two shirt-fronts and comparatively few diamonds in the great golden shining room when she entered it.