No one, not even the rare Belgians who visited Venice, knew anything whatsoever of her or her family. Her husband was assumed to be dead, but who or what he had been when alive, no one was bold enough to pronounce with any positive certainty. She was not particularly refined; indeed very fastidious people pronounced her to be downright vulgar. She was excessively plain, with a little, short, crumpled face, not unlike that of an intelligent marmoset, and a dense, far from neatly arranged, crop of black hair, which overhung her forehead to the very eyebrows. The eyes beneath this dishevelled thatch were small, and of an unmistakable green. She sang with infinite chic and gusto, but without a scrap of voice, accompanying herself by preference upon a cracked mandoline which she carried about with her, and she was universally popular. Yet she was not clever, and, what was perhaps still more remarkable, not even ill-natured, at least few malicious stories had over been supposed to find their first traceable point of dissemination from between her lips.
Lady Frances had somehow, incongruously enough, drifted into a sort of intimacy with her, owing chiefly to a pertinacious sociability upon the other's part, which no coldness, however pronounced, could daunt. To one so shy as she was it was a comfort undeniably to have some one near at hand who would take the whole burden of conversation upon herself, in whose society no uncomfortable pauses could by any possibility occur, nor any embarrassment upon the part of another throw even a momentary film of diffidence upon her own absolute equanimity. She was used, moreover, to having people upon whom she could exercise benevolence, and Madame Facchino was fortunately quite willing to play the indispensable second part in that amiable duet. Thus, for very various reasons, it had come to pass that the little Belgian was one of the very few people in Venice who had established themselves upon a footing of intimacy at the Palazzo Goppo – indeed, had become, to some degree, a sort of necessity to both its inmates, though for very dissimilar reasons. Now and then, it is true, for a moment, for the space of a few seconds, she brushed against a prejudice, or touched the spring of that indomitable pride which lay, like a sort of subterranean frost, far below all Lady Frances's liberalities, real as well as imaginary. But Madame Facchino had a very fair endowment of tact; she was aware in an instant of the danger, and made haste to sheer off again into safe waters, without ever actually touching bottom. She took a good deal of pride out of her intimacy with this gaunt, dull, capable Englishwoman, whom everybody respected, if everybody also a little laughed at. Though not distinctly lying under the accusation of Bohemianism, there was something undoubtedly comfortable and reputable to one of her precarious antecedents to be upon intimate terms with one who belonged to that unimpeachable order which stands like a rock, above and beyond all changes and chances even of fortune. If she would scarcely have undertaken to emulate its ways in her own person, she at least appreciated the results, and would not at all have minded filching a little of its prestige. She might be a trifle vulgar herself, but she had a taste, almost a passion, for the niceties and the comforts of refinement.
"So I find you alone, my Lady! that is good," she said, as she came
