The judicious Gigia had said that the extent of snowy bosom exposed was not too liberal, due consideration being had to the circ.u.mstance that the Diva was to be caught by an unexpected surprise in an undress. So, as Bianca meant to be very much surprised, she carefully, and with dainty fingers, drew back the muslin on either side just a thought, so as to permit to an exploring eye merely such a suggestive peep of the swelling curves on either side as might furnish an estimate of the outline of the veiled heights beyond. She smiled, half with pleased consciousness and half with self-mockery, as she did so: then carefully arranged her drapery so as to allow two slim ankles to be visible just at the point where they crossed each other in a position which exhibited the curved instep of one slender foot in a full front view, and the side of the other negligently thrown across it. The pose was artistically perfect. Lastly, with one or two dexterous touches and shakes, she so arranged her wealth of hair as to combine an appearance of the most perfect negligee with a thoroughly artistic disposition of it, which, while it displayed to the best advantage the tresses themselves, served also to heighten the effect of the contours of neck and bust, which they partly showed and partly concealed.

And then the Diva waited patiently.

She had, as she had said to Gigia, no certain knowledge that he would come, nor even any very clear reason to believe that he would do so--that he would come, that is to say, earlier than one o'clock, at which hour it had been arranged that he should meet Stadione there.

Nevertheless, Bianca had a strong persuasion that he would come earlier.

Despite what she had said to Quinto Lalli of the circ.u.mstances and signs which seemed to indicate that the Marchese was not a man likely to be exposed to danger from such attacks as the Diva meditated making on him,--despite the fact that she had said to herself also all that she had said to her old friend, there had been something about the Marchese's manner--something in that last pressure of palm to palm that had set Bianca speculating as to the meaning of it. It was not a mere manifestation of admiration; the Diva was used enough to that in all its forms, and could read every tone of its language. It was more like wonder and curiosity,--at all events, it was not indifference. She had seen with half an eye, and without the slightest appearance of seeing it, that the Marchese could not keep his eyes away from her. During the drive to the city, and afterwards at the Palazzo Castelmare, while she was making the acquaintance of the princ.i.p.al people of the city, it had been the same thing. And nothing could be further than was the Marchese's manner, from the bold, unabashed staring, which such beautiful Divas as Bianca have often to endure. He evidently was devouring her with his eyes on the sly. Evidently he did not wish to be observed looking at her as he did look. Whenever her own eyes caught him in the fact, his were on the instant withdrawn: to return, as Bianca well marked, on the next instant.

Then, after those first words, which he had addressed to her at their meeting in the road, she had noted that he did not speak to her, as she sat by his side in the carriage, with the simple ease and freedom of indifference. There was almost something approaching to a manifestation of emotion in his manner of addressing her. It could not be that this elderly gentleman,--this very mature Marchese, had fallen in love with her already. Such an idea would have been too absurd! Yet his whole bearing was odd and ill at ease.

It had seemed to himself as if some subtle material influence affected him, as he sat by her side,--as if a magnetic emanation came forth from her that mounted to his brain, and disordered his pulses, and the flow of his blood. He had sat by the side of women as beautiful before now, and never been conscious of being affected in any similar manner. What it was that produced such an effect upon his nervous system,--what was the matter with him, he could not for the life of him imagine. It was unpleasant; he did not like it at all. And yet some irresistible stimulus and curiosity drove him to prolong rather than to avoid the sorcery.

Bianca was by no means fully aware of the power and of the strength of the sorcery which she was exercising on the Marchese. But she understood a great deal more about it than he did. And when, in making the appointment for him and the impresario to call on her at one o'clock, he had asked her if that was too early for her habits, and she had replied, that she was always afoot much earlier than that, Bianca had felt persuaded that he would be at the door at an earlier hour.

And her experience, or her instinct, with reference to such matters had not deceived her.

The quarter-past twelve had not struck, when the Diva heard a knock at the door of her apartment.

CHAPTER IV

Throwing the Line

In the next instant Bianca heard the door of the room in which she was sitting opened very gently; it was Gigia who opened it, so gently as to enable her mistress to keep her eyes on a book she held in her hand, apparently unconscious that she was not alone. The Marchese Lamberto advanced two paces within the room, and then stopped gazing at the exquisite picture before his eyes. Bianca knew that all her preparatory cares were doing the work they were intended to do. But no sound had yet been made to compel her to recognize her visitor's presence; and she remained as motionless as a rec.u.mbent statue.

"I fear, Signora--," said the Marchese, after a few instants given to profiting by the rare opportunity a singular chance had given him,--"I fear, Signora--"

"Santa Maria, who is there!" cried Bianca in a voice of alarm, starting to her feet as she spoke with a bound, that none but so skilled an artist and so perfect a figure could have executed with the faultless elegance with which she accomplished it.

"A thousand pardons, Signora; your servant--"

"The Marchese Lamberto! It is unpardonable in the woman--to have so failed in her duty-towards your Excellency! It is I who have to beg your indulgence, Signor Marchese. Can it be one o'clock already? In truth I had no idea it was so late; and I have still to dress! How can I apologize to your Excellency sufficiently for appearing before you in this dishabille?"

"Nay, Signora, it is in truth I who have to apologize; it is not yet one o'clock, it is not much past twelve! And I feel that I am guilty of an unwarrantable intrusion. But I hoped for the opportunity of having a few words of conversation before the hour named for our little business with our good Signor Ercole. Permit me to a.s.sure you, Signora, that if your servant had given me the least hint that you were not yet--ready to see any visitor--"

"If only your Excellency will excuse--the fact is, I have so rarely any visitors that the poor woman does not understand her duty in such matters. Really I am so covered with confusion,"--she continued, putting up her delicate little hand with a feeble sort of little attempt to draw her dress a little more together across her throat. "I cannot forgive her! She has exposed me to seem wanting in respect towards your Excellency; I will dismiss her from my service!"

"Let me intercede for her, poor woman!" said the Marchese, advancing into the room; "indeed it was mainly my fault, I ought to have asked if you were visible."

"One word from la sua Signoria is enough. If you can forgive me, I must forgive her! But you will own, Signor Marchese, that it is--what shall I say--?" She hesitated and cast her eyes down with a bewitching smile and a little movement of her head to one side, "that it really is--embarra.s.sing! Such a thing never happened to me before!"

"But now it has happened, Signora," said the Marchese, emboldened by the smile, and by a shy sidelong glance, which she shot from under her eye-lashes with a laugh in her eyes, as she spoke; "now it has happened that I have been permitted to see you in a toilet all the more exquisitely charming in that it wants the formality of the costume in which the world is wont to see you,--may I not say what I came for the purpose of saying?"

"Will you be very discreet, Signor?" she said, putting a slender rosy finger up to her smiling lips; "and never, never let it be known to any human being, that I ever received you save in the fullest of full dress, as would become me in receiving the honour of a visit from your Excellency!"

"Not a syllable, not a whisper!" replied the Marchese, taking her tone, and putting his own finger on his lips. "And then, I may say, Signora, that in Ravenna a visit at any hour from old Lamberto di Castelmare would do your fair name no harm!" he added, taking the arm-chair by the side of the sofa to which she pointed, as she resumed her former place and att.i.tude on the couch.

"I dare say it might not, if I am to judge of his position in the society from your own, Signor Marchese. But I did not know, that there was any old Signor Lamberto di Castelmare. I supposed you were the head of the family, your uncle, perhaps?" said Bianca, very innocently.

"I have no uncle, Signora! I am the oldest Castelmare extant," said the Marchese.

"And you call yourself old Lamberto, Marchese! Why I would wager my pearl necklace,--and that is the most valuable possession I have--against a daisy chain, that you are not ten years older than I am.

I shall be called old Bianca Lalli next, at that rate!"

"And how many years, since you are ready to wager on it,--have gone to the bringing the face and form I see before me to their matchless perfection?" said the Marchese.

"Who was ever before so prettily asked how old she was?" said Bianca, suffering her large blue eyes to rest fully on the Marchese's face for an instant, and then dropping them with an air of conscious embarra.s.sment. "Well, a frank question deserves--or at least shall have--a frank answer! I shall never see my twenty-fourth birthday again?"

"And you judge me then to be thirty-four!" said the Marchese, looking at her laughingly.

"Certainly I don't think any room full of strangers would judge you to be more than that," replied Bianca, looking at him seriously.

"Ta!--ta!--ta! Add fifteen years to that; and you will be nearer the mark. So you see, bella Signora, that you may safely trust yourself to a tete-a-tete with me under any circ.u.mstances."

"Ta!--ta!--ta!" said Bianca, repeating his own phrase, with a merry laugh in her eyes, and shaking her rich auburn curls at him. "It seems impossible, utterly incredible! But I am very glad if it is so,--very glad. There is nothing so intolerable to me as the young lads who come buzzing about one circ.u.mstanced as I am, and whom it is as difficult to drive away as it is to drive away flies in summer. There is no trusting to them; they would compromise a poor girl as soon as look at her, if she was fool enough to let them. And I have had lessons in the necessity of caution, Signor Marchese. I have been cruelly treated,--very cruelly calumniated!" And Bianca, knowing, it is to be supposed, that, if it is not always the case that "Beauty's tear is lovelier than her smile," as the poet says, yet that it is a phase of beauty often more potent over a male heart than the sunniest smile, raised a corner of her daintily-embroidered handkerchief to her eyes.

The Marchese was an old man of the world,--as the cynical phrase goes,--and of what a world?--an old Italian Marchese of the beginning of the nineteenth century,--a period when, if crime was less rife than in former and stronger ages, morality was never at a lower ebb. He was a man whose musical tastes had made him conversant with the Divas of the stage, and familiar with the interior aspects of Italian theatrical life;--one, too, whom circ.u.mstances had caused to become specially well acquainted with the antecedent history of this particular Diva now stretched on the sofa before him. Yet none the less for all this did "beauty's tear," enhanced by beauty's laced pocket-handkerchief, exercise on him its usual glamour.

Calumniated!--that lovely creature of matchless purity before him,--matchless purity! so white was her throat; so round and slender her waist; so daintily snowy her muslin drapery. Calumny! Of course it was calumny. And how he could have poignarded the calumniators, and taken the poor, fluttering, persecuted Diva to his bosom. The desire to execute that latter portion of retributive and poetical justice was making itself felt stronger and stronger within him every minute, as he sat beside the sofa exposed to the full force of the magnetic poison-current which was intoxicating him.

"Signora--" he said, putting his hand out to take hers, which she readily gave him. His own hand shook, and he paused in his speech, overcome for a moment by a sort of dizziness and a sudden rush of the blood to his brow and eyes,--a veritable electric shock caused by the contact of her hand with his.

"Signora," he continued, recovering himself, "no such slander--no such insults will follow you here; none such shall follow you here. Lamberto di Castelmare can, at least in Ravenna, promise you that much. Nor if they did follow you, would such stories here be believed."

"Generous! Just!" murmured Bianca behind the laced pocket-handkerchief in a broken voice, just loud enough to reach the neighbouring ear of the Marchese, while she suffered her slender fingers to press the hand which held hers just perceptibly before withdrawing it from him;--"just," she continued in a louder tone, taking her handkerchief from her face, and raising her shoulders a little from the sofa, so as to turn more fully towards him, while her eyes fired point blank into his a broadside of uncontrollable grat.i.tude and admiration;--"just, because generous and n.o.ble. Oh, Signor Marchese, those who have never known what it is to suffer from a slanderous tongue can never know the delight--the sweet consolation of meeting with such generous appreciation."

The poor Diva was quite overcome by her own emotion; and, sinking back on the cushions of the sofa, again lifted her handkerchief to her face, while one or two half-stifled sobs showed how deeply she had been moved;--and how perfect was the form and hue of the beautiful half-covered bosom which this emotion caused to heave beneath its gauzy veil.

Just at that minute there came, to the infinite disgust of the Marchese, a discreet tap at the door.

Bianca rapidly pa.s.sed her fingers over the tresses above her forehead, resettled her pose on the sofa, and gave the Marchese a meaning look of common intelligence and mutual confidence, which set forth, as well as a volume could have done, and established the fact that there existed thenceforward a bond of union and a fellowship between her and him, such as shut them in together, and shut out in the cold all the rest of Ravenna, and then said "Pa.s.si," and admitted, as she knew very well, no more startling an interrupter than Gigia.

The well-trained servant said nothing and looked at nothing; but silently handed to her mistress two cards.

"Of course you told these gentlemen that I was not visible, Gigia?"

"Diamine! Signora; of course I should not have let any gentleman pa.s.s this morning more than any other morning of the year if you had not specially told me to admit the Marchese Lamberto at any hour he might come," said Gigia with a niaise simplicity, as she left the room.

Bianca covered her face with her pretty hands and shook a gale of perfume from her sunny locks, as she exclaimed, sotto voce,--"Oh, the stupidity of these servants! Signor Marchese," she continued, looking up shyly, but with a gay laugh in her eyes, "what must you not imagine?--not, at all events, I hope, that I contemplated the possibility of receiving you in this dishabille? But I will do as other criminals do;--confess when they are found out. I did think," she continued, casting down her eyes, and hesitating with the most charmingly becoming and naive confusion; "I had some little hope--no; I don't mean that;--I did not mean to put that into my confession;--it did occur to me as possible," she went on, hanging her pretty head, and playing nervously with the folds of her dress in a manner which had the accidental effect of causing it to leave uncovered an additional inch of silk stocking--"it did occur to me as possible that the Marchese Lamberto might come to me sooner than the time named for the meeting with the impresario;--for the sake of giving me any hints that his perfect knowledge of the subject might suggest; and I fully intended to be dressed and ready to receive him if he should show me any such condescending kindness--and so told my maid to make an exception in his case to my invariable rule! And then the minutes slipped away; and I fell into a reverie, thinking--thinking--thinking; and then, all of a sudden, before I knew that there was any one in the room--if you think of the devil--and I suppose it is equally true if you think of an angel;--but there, again, that was not intended to be any part of my confession. I think I shall give up confession, at all events to you, Signor Marchese, for the future. But now I have confessed myself this time, and told the whole, whole truth--may I hope for absolution?"

There was an adorable mixture of candour, and gaiety of heart, and child-like simplicity in the beautiful features as she looked up into his face when she finished speaking, together with an expression of appealing confidence and almost tenderness in the eyes that achieved the final and complete subjugation of the Marchese.

Again he took her hand, and again his head swam round with the violence of the emotion caused by the contact of palm with palm, as he said,

"Ah, Signora, if I were equally candid perhaps it would turn out that it was for me to confess, and for you to grant absolution--if you could. Do you think you could?" he said, raising her hand to his lips as he said the words.