with a twinkle: “A new ‘star’ has dawned on the operatic horizon. La
Betisi, the pretty little soprano with the fiend’s temper and the
seraph’s voice, has created a furore at Rome and Milan. She will ‘star’
over here in her successful rôles. I have it from the impresario
himself.”
“_Ebbene!_” Carlo shrugged his shoulders and smiled with superb
patronage. “We shall be very glad to welcome the little one.... Artists
should know how to value genius in others.”
“How well you always express things!” said Rebelli, grinning. “She is to
sing Isolina in ‘Belverde’ on the 10th. The Spanish _prima donna_ has
broken her contract. As Galantuomo, you will have an excellent
opportunity of judging of her talents,” he added, as he turned away,
“and scowling at the lady.”
But Carlo did not scowl at first. He was all engaging courtesy and
cordial welcome at the first rehearsal, when he was presented
ceremoniously to a tiny little lady with willful dark eyes, pouting
scarlet lips, and hair as golden as her own Neapolitan sunshine. She
vaguely reminded the tenor of somebody he had seen before.
“The Maestro is coming from Naples to conduct,” he heard Rebelli say.
“He vowed that La Betisi should make her _début_ under no _bâton_ save
his own. Her rôle will be Isolina in his ‘Belverde,’ in which, you know,
she created such a sensation at La Scala.”
“And you, Signor, are to sing the great part of Galantuomo in the
‘Belverde’?” said the Betisi demurely to Gladiali. “This time I will not
say, ‘_I had rather sing with my cat!_’”
Carlo started. Yes; there was no mistaking the willful mouth and the
flashing defiant eyes. The little girl who had sung so divinely in the
Maestro’s dusty room ten years ago was the new operatic “star.” But he
was not jealous of the Betisi as yet. He said the most exquisite
things—as only an Italian can say them—and bowed over her hand.
“The Signorina has fulfilled the glorious promise of her childhood and
the prophecy of the Maestro,” he said. “She who once sang like a cherub
now sings like an angel. I am dying to hear you!” he added.
“Ah!” cried the Betisi with a little trill of laughter, “if you are
dying now, what will you do afterwards?” The speech might have meant
much or nothing, and, though Carlo Gladiali winced a little, he made no
comment.
A few rehearsals later a cloud of snuff enveloped him, and he was
clasped in the arms of a brown great-coat of antique design. Add, above,
a gray woolen comforter and a traveling cap with ear-pieces, and, below,
a pair of green trousers, ending in cloth boots with patent-leather
toecaps, and you have the portrait of the Maestro in traveling costume.
“Heaven be praised, my dear Carlino, that I have lived to see this
day!... Have you renewed acquaintance with my little witch, my enchanted
bird, my drop of singing-water? Embrace, my children; your Maestro
wishes it!”
And Gladiali touched the cheek of Emilia Betisi with his lips. Her
sparkling eyes looked mockingly into his. Then the Maestro, who spoke
not a word of English, scrambled to the conductor’s chair, and commenced
to harangue the musicians who constituted the orchestra in a fluent
conglomeration of several other languages, and the rehearsals of
“Belverde” began.
The new soprano and the new opera made an instantaneous and unparalleled
“hit.” Carlo helped to pick up La Betisi’s bouquets, and made a pretty
speech to her at the final descent of the curtain. But his heart was not
in his eyes or on his lips.
Upon the second representation, he yawned in the middle of Isolina’s
great aria, and he openly sneered at the audience for encoring the song
three times. In the last Act, in the Garden Scene, which offered the
principal opportunity for the display of the new _prima donna’s_ art,
Carlo sucked jujubes, and openly wore one in his cheek while receiving,
as Galantuomo, from the maddened Isolina the most feverish protestations
of love. He noted something more than feigned frenzy in the flaming
black eyes of the Betisi at this juncture, and, somewhat unwisely,
permitted himself to smile. Next moment he received a deep scratch upon
the cheek, which tingled for a moment, then bled copiously, obliging the
tenor to sing the final Romanza with a handkerchief to his face.
“Convey to Signor Gladiali my profoundest apologies,” said the Betisi to
her dresser. “He will really think that he was singing a duet with a
cat! But the next performance goes better.” Her dark eyes gleamed, her
red lips smiled. She thirsted for the second representation.
So did Carlo. He had thought out a few little things calculated to drive
a _cantatrice_ to the pitch of desperation. For instance, at the second
encore of her great song, separated only by a duet from _his_ great song
in the First Act, he would fetch a chair and sit down. Aha!
But—whether his intention had leaked out through Rebelli, to whom in a
moment of champagne he had confided it, or whether the Betisi was in
league with demons, let it be decided—it was she who fetched, not a
chair, but a three-legged stool, and sat down on it in the middle of his
first encore. And so charming an air of patience did she assume, and so
genuine seemed her pity for the deluded public who had redemanded the
song, that Signor Carlo, who wore a strip of black Court plaster on one
cheek, nearly had an apoplexy. He meant to eat jujubes through _her_
great song, but the Betisi was prepared. She produced a box and offered
them to him, singing all the while more brilliantly than she had ever
sung before; and when the house rose at her in rapture and demanded an
encore, she tripped and fetched the three-legged stool and gave it, with
a triumphant curtsey, to the foaming Galantuomo. And the crowded house
roared with delight.
But the punishment of Carlo came in the Second Act. In the celebrated
Garden Scene, where slighted love drives Isolina into temporary madness,
she not only scratched her Galantuomo on the other cheek, but pulled his
wig off. And in the crowning scene, where Isolina reveals herself as the
daughter of the King, and summons the Court to witness the humiliation
of Galantuomo by beating on a gong which is suspended from a tree, came
the Betisi’s great opportunity. Running through the most difficult
passages of the arduous _scena_ with the greatest nonchalance, disposing
of octaves, double octaves, and ranging from _sol_ to _si_-flat in the
violin-clef with the utmost ease, she electrified and enthralled her
hearers; and, in the _gusto_ of singing, when the moment arrived for
striking on the gong previously referred to, she missed the instrument,
and struck the tenor violently upon the nose. The unfortunate organ
attained pantomimic dimensions within the few minutes that ensued
subsequently to the delivery of the blow and previous to the falling of
the curtain, and I have heard was favored by the gallery with a special
call.
“Alas, Signor Carlo, I know not how to express my regret!... I was
carried away...” faltered the Betisi, as with secret triumph and feigned
remorse she looked upon the tenor’s swollen nose.
Carlo gave her a passionate glance over it. As it had enlarged, so had
his heart and his understanding; he saw his enemy beautiful,
triumphant—a Queen of Song. He was conquered and her slave.
“Never mind my nose,” he said generously. “I am beaten, fairly beaten,
and with my own weapons. You are a clever woman, Signora, and a great
singer. Permit me to take your hand.”
“There,” she said, and gave it. “And you, Signor, are a magnificent
artist, though I have sometimes thought you a stupid man. What is it but
stupidity—_Dio!_” she cried, “to be jealous of a woman of whom one is
not even the lover or the husband?”
“Give me the right to be jealous,” said Carlo the tenor. “Make me one
and the other! Marry me, Emilia. I adore you!”
An atmosphere of snuff and mildew enveloped them, as the Maestro, the
date and design of whose evening dress-suit baffled the antiquarian and
enraptured the caricaturist, embraced both the tenor and the soprano in
rapid succession.
“Aha! _Mes enfants_, am I not a true prophet?” he cried. “_Hasten to
grow up_, I said to the little one ten years ago, _and Carlo there shall
one day sing Romeo to thy Juliet_.” He embraced them again. “You sing
like angels—you quarrel like devils! Heaven intended you for one
another. Be happy!” And the Maestro blessed the betrothed lovers with a
sprinkling of snuff.
THE TUG OF WAR
Men invariably termed her “a sweet woman.” Women called her other
things.
What was she like? Of middle height and “caressable,” with a rounded,
supple figure, exquisitely groomed and got up! Her golden hair would
have been merely brown, if left to Nature. It came nearly to her
eyebrows in the dearest little rings, and was coaxed into the loveliest
of coils and waves and undulations. Her eyes were lustrous hazel, her
eyelashes and eyebrows as nearly black as perfect taste allowed. Her
cheeks were of an ivory pallor, sometimes relieved with a faint
sea-shell bloom. Her features were beautifully cut, inclining to the
aquiline in outline. Her voice was low and tender, especially when she
was saying the sort of thing that puts a young fellow out of conceit
with the girl he is engaged to, and makes the married man wonder why he
threw himself away. Why he was such an infuriated ass, by George! as to
beg and pray Clara to marry him ten years ago, and buy a new revolver
when she said it was esteem she felt for him, not love. Why Fate should
ordain just at this particular juncture that he should encounter the one
woman, by jingo! the only woman in the world who had ever really
understood and sympathized with him! It was Mrs. Osborne’s vocation to
make men of all grades, ranks, and ages ask this question. She had
followed her chosen path in life with enthusiasm, let us say, collecting
scalps, with here and there a little shudder of pity, and here and there
a little smart of pain. Fascination, exercised almost involuntarily, was
to her, as to the cobra, the means of life. Not in a vulgar sense,
because the late Colonel Osborne had left his widow handsomely provided
for. But the excitement of the sport, the keen delight of capturing new
victims—bringing the quarry boldly down in the open, or setting
insidious snares, pitfalls, and traps for the silly prey to blunder
into—these joys the huntress knows who sharpens her arrows and weaves
her webs for Man.
I have said—or hinted—that other women did not love Mrs. Osborne.
Knowing, as they did, that the lovely widow frankly despised them, her
own sex responded by openly declaring war. They knew her strength, and
never attacked her save in bands. Yet, strange to say, the invincible
Mrs. Osborne was never so nearly worsted as in a single-handed combat to
which she was challenged by a mere neophyte—“a chit”—as, had she lived
in the eighteenth instead of the twentieth century, the fair widow would
have termed Polly Overshott.
Polly’s real name was Mariana, but, as everyone in the county said,
Polly seemed more appropriate. Sir Giles Overshott had no other child,
and sometimes seemed not to regret this limitation of his family circle.
Lady Overshott had been dead some five years when the story opens, and
Sir Giles was beginning to speak of himself as a widower, which to
experienced ears means much.
The estate of Overshott Foxbrush was a fine one, unencumbered, and
yielding a handsome rent-roll. It was understood that Polly would have
nearly everything. She had consented in the most daughterly manner to
become engaged to the eldest son of a county neighbor, a young gentleman
with whom she was very much in love, Costebald Ianson Smithgill,
commonly known as “Cis” Smithgill, his united initials forming the
caressing little name. He was six feet high, and had a bass voice with
treble inflections, which he was training for a parliamentary career. He
had, until the demise of an elder brother removed him from the service
of his country, held a lieutenancy in the Guards. As to his family, who
does not know that the Smithgills are a family of extreme antiquity,
descended from that British Princess and daughter of Vortigern who drank
the health of Hengist, proffering the Saxon General the mead-horn of
welcome when he first set his conquering foot on British soil? Who does
not know this, knows nothing. The mead-horn is said to be enclosed in
the masonry of the eldest portion of Hengs Hall, the family seat in the
country of Mixshire, where, of course, the scene of our story is laid.
And Polly and Cis had been engaged about two months when Mrs. Osborne
took The Sabines, and was called on by the county, because Osborne had
been the cousin of an Earl, and she herself came of a very good family.
You don’t want any name much better than that of Weng. And Mrs. Osborne
came of the Wengs of Hollowshire.
She took The Sabines for the sake of her health, which required country
air. It was an old-fashioned, square Jacobean house of red brick faced
with stone, and it boasted a yew walk, the yews whereof had been wrought
by some long-moldered-away tree-clipper into arboreal representatives of
the Rape of the Sabines. That avenue was one of the lions of the county,
and every fresh tenant of the place had to bind him or herself, under
fearful penalties, to keep the Sabine ladies and their abductors
properly clipped.
Mrs. Osborne was destitute of the faculty of reverence, Lady Smithgill
of Hengs said afterwards. Because early in June, when she drove over to
call—it would not become even a Smithgill to ignore a Weng of
Hollowshire—upon turning a curve in the avenue so as to command the
house, the lawn, and the celebrated Yew Tree Walk, the new tenant of The
Sabines, exquisitely attired in a Paris gown and carrying a marvelous
guipure sunshade, appeared to view; Sir Giles Overshott was with her,
and the lady and the baronet were laughing heartily.
“Mrs. Osborne _simply shrieked_,” Lady Smithgill said afterwards, in
confidence to a few dozen dear friends; “and Sir Giles was quite
purple—that unpleasant shade, don’t you know?
“It turned out that they were amusing themselves at the expense of The
Sabines. I looked at her, and I fancy I showed my surprise at her want
of taste.
“‘We think a great deal of them in the county,’ I said, ‘and Sir Giles
can tell you how severe a censure would be pronounced by persons of
taste upon the tenant who was so audacious as to deface or so careless
as to neglect them, or even, ignorantly, to make sport of them.’
“At that Sir Charles became a deeper shade, almost violet, and she
uncovered her eyes and smiled. I think somebody has told her she
resembled Bernhardt in her youth.
“‘Dear Lady Smithgill,’ she said, or rather cooed (and those cooing
voices are so irritating!), ‘depend on it, I shall make a point of
keeping them in the most _perfect_ condition. To be obliged to pay a
forfeit to my landlord would be a nuisance, but to be censured by
persons of taste residing in the county, that would be quite
insupportable.’ Then she rang for tea, and there were eight varieties of
little cakes, which must have been sent down from Buszard’s, and a
cut-glass liqueur bottle of rum upon the tray. ‘Do you take rum?’ she
had the audacity to ask me. I did not stoop to decline verbally, but
shook my head slightly, and she gave me another of _those smiles_ and
passed on the rum. Sir Charles brought it me, and I waved it away,
_speechless_, absolutely speechless, at the monstrosity of the idea.
“She overwhelmed me with apologies, of course.
“And both Sir Giles—who, I regret to see, is constantly there—and Sir
Costebald, who has _once_ called—consider her a sweet woman. But—think
me foreboding if you will—I _cannot_ feel that county Society has an
acquisition in Mrs. Osborne.”
“Papa goes to The Sabines rather often,” said Polly Overshott, when it
came to her turn to be the recipient of Lady Smithgill’s confidence. “He
does say that Mrs. Osborne is a sweet woman, and he is helping her to
choose some brougham horses. He says the pair she brought down are
totally unfit for country roads. And as for the rum, she offered it to
me. Colonel Osborne held a post in the Diplomatic Service at Berlin, and
Germans drink it in tea, and I rather like it, though a second cup gives
you a headache afterwards.”
“Mary!” screamed Miss Overshott’s mamma-in-law elect, who had effected
this compromise between Polly and Mariana.
“As regards The Sabines,” Polly went on, “we have bowed down before them
for years and years, and we shall go on doing it, but they are absurd
all the same. So are our lead groups and garden temples at
Overshott—awfully absurd——”
“I suppose you include our Saxon buttress and Roman pavement at Hengs in
the catalogue of absurdities,” said Lady Smithgill icily. “Fortunately,
Sir Costebald is not a widower, or they might stand in some danger of
being swept away. At the present moment, let me tell you, Mary, your
lead figures and garden temples are far from secure. That woman leads
your father by the nose—twines him round her little finger. Cis tells
me——”
“What does Cis know about it?” said Polly, flushing to the temples.
“Cis is a man of the world,” said Lady Smithgill. “But at the same time
he is a dutiful son. He tells everything to his mother. It seems—Cis
personally vouches for the truth of this—that Sir Giles is constantly at
The Sabines—in fact, every day.... He is dressed for conquest, it would
appear.”
“Cis or Papa?” asked Polly, with feigned innocence.
“Sir Giles wears coats and neckties that would be condemned as showy if
worn by a bridegroom,” said Lady Smithgill rapidly. “He is perfumed with
expensive extracts, and his boots must be torture, Cis says, knowing all
one does know of the Overshott tendency to gout. He never removes his
eyes from Mrs. Osborne, laughs to idiocy at everything she says, and
simply _lives_ in the corner of the sofa next her. He monopolizes the
conversation. Nobody else can get in a word, Cis tells me.”
“Since when did Cis begin to be jealous?” said Polly under her breath.
“I did not quite catch your remark,” returned Lady Smithgill. “By the
way, Mary, I hope you will wear those pearls as often as you can. They
require air, sunshine, and exercise.... I contracted my chronic
rheumatic tendency thirty years ago through sitting in the garden with
them on. For days together Sir Costebald’s mother used to _skip_ in them
upon the terrace, but I never went as far as that.”
“The pearls—what pearls?” asked Polly vaguely.
“Dear Mary, when a _fiancé_ makes a gift of such beauty—to say nothing
of its value—and the strings were originally purchased for two thousand
pounds—it is customary for the recipient to exhibit a _little_
appreciation,” Lady Smithgill returned.
“Appreciation!”
“Of course you thanked Cis, my dear. I never doubted that. But there, we
will say no more....”
Polly’s blue eyes flashed. She rose up; she had ridden over to the Hall
alone, and her slight upright figure looked its best in a habit.
“I should like to say a little more.” She put up her hand and unpinned
her hat from her close braids of yellow-gold, and tossed the headgear
into a neighboring chair. “Dear Lady Smithgill, Cis has not given me any
pearls. Perhaps he has sent them to Bond Street to be cleaned——”
“Cleaned! They are in perfect condition.”
“Or—or perhaps he has given them to some one else. I have seen very
little of Cis lately,” Polly ended. “But Papa tells me that he is a good
deal at The Sabines. Papa seemed to find him as much in the way as ...
as Cis found Papa. And—her new kitchenmaid is the sister of our
laundrywoman, and a report reached me that she had lately been wearing
some magnificent pearls.... I thought nothing of it at the time, but
now....”
There was a snorting gasp from Lady Smithgill. All had been made clear.
Her double chin trembled, and her eyes went wild.
“Mary!” she cried.... “I have been blind! My boy—my infatuated boy! That
woman has a positively fiendish power over men.... She will
enslave—ensnare Cis as she has done your father and dozens of others.
Oh! my dear, there are stories.... She is relentless. The Sowersea’s
second son, De la Zouch Sowersea, is now driving a cab in Melbourne, and
the Countess attributes everything to her. At Berlin—where her husband
had a diplomatic appointment, and she learned to offer refined
English-women rum in their tea—there were worse scandals—agitations,
duels! Now my son is in peril. Save him, Mary! Do something before it is
too late!”
“I can hardly drop in at The Sabines—say I have called for my property,
and take Cis and Papa away,” said Polly, her short upper lip quivering
with pain and anger. “But I will think over what is best to be done. In
the meantime do not worry Cis. Leave him to go his way. We need not be
too nervous. He and Papa will keep an eye upon each other,” she ended.
“You know more of this than you have told me,” poor Lady Smithgill
gasped. “There are scandals in the air—people are talking—about my boy
and that woman! Why did she ever come here?” the unhappy lady murmured.
“I said from the first that she would be no acquisition to the county!”
Polly’s cob, Kiss-me-Quick, came round, and Polly took leave. She had
warm young blood in her veins, and an imperious temper of her own, and
to be asked to “do something” to add a fresh access of caloric to the
obviously cooling temperature of one’s betrothed is not flattering. Yes,
she had suspected before; yes, she had known more than she had told the
proprietress of the agitated double chin and the agitated maternal
feelings. Sir Giles had betrayed Cis as unconsciously as he had betrayed
himself. “Really, Poll, I think you ought to keep the young man better
to heel,” he had said. “He means no harm, but Mrs. Osborne is a
dangerously fascinating woman, and a woman of that type possesses
advantages over a girl. And, of course, I don’t suggest anything in the
nature of disloyalty to yourself—Cis is the soul of honor and all that.
But to see an engaged young fellow sitting on footstools, and lying on
the grass at the feet of a pretty woman—who doesn’t happen to be the
_right one_—turning up his eyes at her like a dying duck in a
thunderstorm—by George!—irritates me. He is always in Mrs. Osborne’s
pocket, and one never can get a word with her alone—I mean, nobody is
allowed to usurp her attention for an instant. And here is the key to
the Crackle-Room, since you are asking for it.”
And Sir Giles handed his daughter the key in question, a slim, rusty
implement belonging to the showroom of Overshott, an octagonal boudoir,
periodically dusted and swept by the housekeeper’s reverent hands, but
otherwise untouched, since Lady Barbara Overshott, the friend and
correspondent of Pope and Addison, was found by her distracted husband
sitting stone dead at her spinet before the newly-copied score of the
“Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day,” which had been sent her with the united
compliments of the author and the composer. The furniture of the boudoir
was of the reign of William and Mary, the walls panelled with pink
lacquer beaded with ormolu, the shelves, brackets and cabinets laden
with priceless specimens of crackle ware—the joy of the connoisseur and
the envy of the collector.
“Thank you,” said Polly, taking the key. “I was anxious to see for
myself how many of Lady Bab’s vases and bowls are left to us.” She
looked very tall and very fair, and rather terrifying as she confronted
Sir Giles. They were in the hall of Overshott, the doors of which stood
wide open to the faint September breeze and the hot September sunshine,
and Sir Giles, who was going to luncheon at The Sabines, was putting on
a thin dust-coat in preparation for the drive. He jumped at the
reference to the crackle.
“I suppose Mrs. Brownlow has told you that I have removed a piece or
two,” he said, bungling with the sleeves of his dust-coat, for lack of
the daughterly hitch at the back of the collar which would have induced
the refractory garment to go on.
“Mrs. Brownlow has told me that a baker’s dozen of bowls and vases and
plaques and teapots—the cream of the collection, in fact,” said Polly,
“are adorning Mrs. Osborne’s drawing-room.”
“Confound it!” said Sir Giles, as he struggled with his garment. “The
crockery isn’t entailed; and if I desire to give a teapot to a friend I
suppose I can do as I like with my own! And—I can’t keep the cart
waiting. Fanchon won’t stand.”