And something within her felt a stab of pain, something within her soul and yet surely a thousand miles away.
“Tutto--tutto al mondo e vano,” murmured Lady Cardington. “We feel that and we feel it, and--do you?”
“When you sing that song you look like the love that gives all sweetness to men. Sing like that, look like that, and you--If Sir Donald had heard you!”
She came to sit down near Lady Cardington.
And she searched Lady Cardington’s eyes with eyes full of inquiry.
Lady Cardington looked away. The wistful power that generally seemed a part of her personality had surely died out in her. There was something nervous in her expression, deprecating in her attitude.
“Why do you speak about Sir Donald?” Lady Holme said.
Lady Cardington looked up. There was an extraordinary sadness in her eyes, mingled with a faint defiance.
“That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?”
“Sir Donald! Sir Donald--madly anything!”
She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight up.
“You don’t understand anything but youth,” she said.
There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
“And yet,” she added, after a pause, “you can sing till you break the heart of age--break its heart.”
Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised that she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire. She sat and looked at Lady Cardington’s tall figure swayed by grief, listened to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly, as if someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very old.
“We both regret the same thing in the same way,” she said. “We were both wretched in--in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought--I had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my hope.”
And she said it with more tenderness than she had ever before used to a woman.
Lady Cardington pressed a pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.
“Sing me that song again,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything more. Just sing it again and I’ll go.”
“Torna in fior di giovinezza Isaotta Blanzesmano, Dice: Tutto al mondo a vano: Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”