In which Mary Reveals Certain Suspicions.
Dinner, served with that same stiff stateliness that characterised everything in the Morini household, was over, and the three men had rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room.
Mary, in a pretty décolleté dinner-gown of pale pink chiffon, with a single tea-rose in her corsage, had, at Dubard’s suggestion, gone to the piano, and in a sweet contralto had sung some of those old Florentine folk-songs, or stornelli, as they are called, those weirdly mediaeval songs that are still sung by the populace in the streets of Florence to-day. Then as conclusion she ran her fingers lightly over the keys and sang—
“Fiorin Fiorello!
Di tutti i fiorellin che fioriranno,
Il fior del’ amor mio sara il piu bello?”
“Brava! Brava!” cried the young Frenchman standing by the piano, and as she raised her eyes to his, it was patent that the pair entertained a regard for each other.
“Your songs of old Florence are so charming, so different from everything else in music, mademoiselle,” he declared. “We have nothing like them in France. Our chansons are, after all, inharmonious rubbish. It is not surprising that you in Italy have a contempt for our literature, our music, and our drama, for it cannot compare with yours. We have had no poet like Dante, no composer like Verdi, no musician like Paganini—and,” he added, dropping his voice to a low whisper as he bent quickly to her ear, “no woman so fair as Mary Morini.”
She blushed, and busied herself with her music books in order to conceal her confusion. The general was chatting with her father and mother at the farther end of the long room, and therefore did not notice that swift passage of admiration on the part of Jules Dubard.
The Frenchman was a friend of the family, mainly because he had been helpful to Morini in a variety of ways, and also on account of his pleasant, easy-going manner and quiet elegance. He was from the South. The old family château—a grey, dismal place full of ghostly memories and mildewed pictures of his ancestors—stood high up in the Pyrenees above Bayonne, five miles from the Spanish frontier; yet he had always lived in Paris, and from the days when he left college on his father’s death he had led the gay, irresponsible life of the modern Parisian of means, was a member of the Jockey Club, and a well-known figure at the Café Américain and at Maxim’s.
As a young man about the French capital he gave frequent bachelor parties at his cosy flat in the Avenue Macmahon, and possessing a very wide circle of friends, he had been able to render the Italian Minister of War several confidential services.
Two years ago, while in Rome, he had received an invitation to dine one evening at His Excellency’s splendid old palace—once the residence of a Roman prince—and from that time had been on terms of intimacy with the family and one of Mary’s most ardent admirers. He spent a good deal of his time in the Eternal City, and had during the past season become a familiar figure in society.