Beyond These Voices. M. E. Braddon
an apartment on the second floor, which Signor Canincio, the landlord, declared to be superior in every particular, as well as one lire less per diem.
"I should have thought your husband would have hesitated before putting one of his best customers to inconvenience for a party who drops from the skies, and may never come here again," Lady Jones complained to the landlord's English wife, who was, if anything, more plausible than her Italian husband.
The Holloway builder's widow was uncertain in her aspirates, more especially when discomposed by a sense of injury.
Madame Canincio pleaded that they could not afford to turn away good fortune in the person of a Roman millionaire, who took a whole floor, and would have all his meals served in his private salle à manger, the extra charge for which indulgence would come to almost as much as her ladyship's "arrangement"; for Lady Sutherland Jones, albeit supposed to be wealthy, was not liberal. Her late husband had been knighted, after the opening by a Royal Princess of a vast pile of workmen's dwellings, paid for by an American philanthropist, and neither husband nor wife had achieved that shibboleth of gentility, the letter "h."
Vera heard all about Signor Provana, and his daughter, next morning from Dr. Wilmot, who was more elated at the letting of the first floor to that great man than she had ever seen him by any other circumstance in the quiet life of San Marco.
"I consider the place made from this hour," said the doctor, rubbing his well-shaped white hands in a prophetic rapture. "There will be paragraphs in all the Roman papers, and it will be my business to see that they get into the New York Herald. We must boom our pretty little San Marco, my dear Lady Felicia. Your coming here was good luck, for we want our English aristocracy to take us up—but all over the world Mario Provana's is a name to conjure with; and if his daughter can recover her health here, we shall make San Marco as big as San Remo before we are many years older. It was my wife's delicate chest that brought me here, and I have been rewarded by the beauty of the place and, I think I may venture to say, the influential position that I have obtained here."
He might have added that his villa and garden cost him about half the rent he would have had to pay in San Remo or Mentone, while a clever manager like Mrs. Wilmot could make a superior figure in San Marco on economical terms.
"How old is the girl?" Lady Felicia asked languidly.
"Between fifteen and sixteen, I believe. She will be a nice companion for Miss Davis."
"I do so hope we may be friends," Vera said eagerly. In a hotel where almost everybody was elderly, the idea of a girl friend was delightful.
Lady Felicia, who had been very severe in her warnings against hotel-acquaintance, answered blandly, though with a touch of condescension.
"If the girl is really nice, and has been well brought up, I should see no objections to Vera's knowing her."
"Thank you, Grannie," cried Vera. "She is sure to be nice!"
"Signor Provana's daughter cannot fail to be nice," protested the doctor.
Lady Felicia was dubious.
"An Italian!" she said. "She may be precocious—artful—of doubtful morality."
"Signor Provana's daughter! Impossible!"
Nothing happened to stir the stagnant pool of life at San Marco during the next day and the day after that. Vera asked Madame Canincio when Signor Provana and his daughter were expected, but could obtain no precise information. The rooms were ready. Madame Canincio showed Vera the salon, which she had seen in its spacious emptiness, with the shabby hotel furniture, but to which Signor Provana's additions had given an air of splendour. Sofas and easy chairs had been sent from Genoa, velvet curtains and portières, bronze lamps, and silver candlesticks, Persian carpets, everything that makes for comfort and luxury; and the bedroom for the young lady had been even more carefully prepared; but, beside her own graceful pillared bedstead, with its lace mosquito curtains, was the narrow bed for the night-nurse, which gave its sad indication of illness.
The flowers were ready in the vases, filling the salon with perfume.
"I believe they will be here before sunset," Madame Canincio told Vera. "We are waiting for a telegram to order dinner. The chef is in an agony of anxiety. First impressions go for so much, and no doubt Signor Provana is a gourmet."
Vera heard no more that day, but the maid who brought the early breakfast told her that the great man and his daughter had arrived at five o'clock on the previous afternoon. Vera went to the flower market in a fever of expectation, bought her cheap supply of red and purple anemones, her poor little bunch of Parma violets and branches of mimosa, thinking of the luxury of tuberoses and camellias in the Provana salon, but she thought much more of the sick girl, and the father's love, exemplified in all that forethought and preparation. For youth in vigorous health there is always a melancholy interest in youth that is doomed to die, and Vera's heart ached with sympathy for the consumptive girl, for whom a father's wealth might do everything except spin out the weak thread of life.
She heard voices in the hotel garden, as she went up the sloping carriage drive, with her flower basket on her arm; and at a bend in the avenue of pepper trees and palms she stopped with a start, surprised at the gaiety of the scene, which made the shabby hotel garden seem a new place.
The dusty expanse of scanty grass which passed for a lawn, where nothing gayer than aloes and orange trees had flourished, was now alive with colour. A girl in a smart white cloth frock and a large white hat was sitting in a blue and gold wicker chair, a girl all brightness and vitality, as it seemed to Vera; where she had expected to see a languid invalid reclining among a heap of pillows, a wasted hand drooping inertly, too feeble to hold a book.
This girl's aspect was of life, not of sickness and coming death. Her eyes were darkest brown, large and brilliant, with long black lashes that intensified their darkness, intensified also by the marked contrast of hair that was almost flaxen, parted on her forehead, and hanging in a single thick plait that fell below her waist, and was tied with a blue ribbon. Three spaniels, one King Charles, and two Blenheims, jumped and barked about her chair, and increased the colour and gaiety of her surroundings by their frivolous decorations of silver bells and blue ribbons; and, as if this were not enough of colour, gaudy draperies of Italian printed cotton were flung upon the unoccupied chairs, and covered a wicker table, while, as the highest note in this scale of colour, a superb crimson and green cockatoo, with a tail of majestic length, screamed and fluttered on his perch, and responded not too amiably to the attentions of Dr. Wilmot, who was trying to scratch himself into the bird's favour.
The doctor desisted from his "Pretty Pollyings" on perceiving Vera. "Ah, Miss Davis, that's lucky. Do stop a minute with Grannie's flowers. I want to introduce you to Mademoiselle di Provana."
The "di" was the embellishment of Dr. Wilmot, who could not imagine wealth and importance without nobility, but the financier called himself Provana tout court.
Vera murmured something about being "charmed," put down her basket on the nearest chair, and went eagerly towards the fair girl with the dark, lustrous eyes, who held out a dazzling white hand, smiling delightedly.
"I am so glad to find you here. Dr. Veelmot"—she stumbled a little over the name, otherwise her English was almost perfect; "Dr. Vilmot told me you were English, and about my own age, and that we ought to be good friends. I am so glad you are English. I have talked much English with my governess, but I want a companion of my own age. I have had no girl friend since I left the Convent three year ago. Dr Vilmot tell me your father was a poet. That is lovely, lovely. My father is a great man, but he is not a poet, though he loves Dante."
"My little girl is an enthusiast, and something of a dreamer," said a deep, grave voice, and a large, tall figure came into view suddenly from behind a four-leaved Japanese screen that had been placed at the back of the invalid's chair, to guard her from an occasional breath of cold wind that testified to the fact that, although all things had the glory of June, the month was February.
Vera was startled by a voice which seemed different from any other voice she had ever heard—so grave,