Page:The Coming Race, etc - 1888.djvu/306

292 the manuscript of a new part in which she was shortly to appear. By her side was the guitar on which she had been practising the airs that were to ravish the ears of the cognoscenti. But the guitar had been thrown aside in despair—her voice this morning did not obey her will. The manuscript lay unheeded, and the eyes of the actress were fixed on the broad, blue deep beyond. In the unwonted negligence of her dress might be traced the abstraction of her mind. Her beautiful hair was gathered up loosely, and partially bandaged by a kerchief, whose purple colour seemed to deepen the golden hue of the tresses. A stray curl escaped, and fell down the graceful neck. A loose morning-robe, girded by a sash, left the breeze that came ever and anon from the sea to die upon the bust half disclosed, and the tiny slipper, that Cinderella might have worn, seemed a world too wide for the tiny foot which it scarcely covered. It might be the heat of the day that deepened the soft bloom of the cheeks, and gave an unwonted languor to the large dark eyes. In all the pomp of her stage attire—in all the flush of excitement before the intoxicating lamps—never had Isabel looked so lovely.

By the side of the actress, and filling up the threshold, stood Gionetta, with her hands thrust up to the elbow in two huge recesses on either side of her gown—pockets, indeed, they might be called by courtesy such pockets—as Beelzebub's grandmother might have shaped for herself, bottomless pits in miniature.

"But I assure you," said the nurse, in that sharp, quick, ear-splitting tone in which the old women of the south are more than a match for those of the north, "but I assure you, my darling, that there is not a finer cavalier in all Naples, nor a more beautiful, than this Inglese'—and I am told that all the Inglesi are much richer than they seem. Though they have no trees in their country, poor people, and instead of twenty-four they have only twelve hours to the day, yet I hear, cospetto! that they shoe their horses with scudi; and since they cannot (the poor heretics !) turn grapes into wine, for they have no grapes, they turn gold into physic, and take a glass or two of pistoles whenever they are troubled with the colic. But you don't hear me. Little pupil of my eyes, you don't hear me ! "

"Gionetta, is he not godlike ? "

"Sancta Maria! he is handsome, bellissimo; and when you are his wife for they say these English are never satisfied unless they marry"

"Wife!—English!—whom are you talking of?"

"Why, the young English signer, to be sure."

"Chut! I thought you spoke of Zicci."