Carlota stood aside to let them pass down the narrow stairs. In the
half light from the dusty skylight overhead she seemed like a shadow
excepting for the light in her eyes. The sunlight from the studio’s
south window sent a lane of gold through the open door, and she watched
Nathalie as she laid her hand in Ames’s lingeringly.
“I shall love it here,” she heard her say, in her rather plaintive,
appealing way. “And I want you to be sure and stay for dinner Tuesday.
You can suggest things for our Italian fête next month, can’t he,
mother?”
“I shall be delighted if I can be of any service,” Ames told her, as he
followed down the four flights of stairs to the waiting car.
Even Ptolemy seemed to catch the contagion of trouble in the air and
leaped stealthily out of her way to the top of the piano. Carlota
waited, standing in the center of the floor, her eyes ablaze with scorn
as Ames entered.
“You were exactly like old Pietro, my grandmother’s courier,” she told
him. “I have never seen you like that before. Who are these people? Why
did you ask me to sing for them?”
He swept her a low bow jubilantly.
“Dear, it means ten dollars a lesson. That is the Mrs. Carrington
Nevins and her only daughter. She will bring me other pupils, too, from
her crowd out on the north shore. You’re my mascot.”
“Did you try her voice?” She spoke very softly. “Do you intend giving
her lessons?”
“I certainly do.” He began rummaging in the wall cupboard after his
stock of china. “We’re going to celebrate my first real success. I’m
going to the market and buy a spread and telephone Dmitri to come down,
and you shall preside and sing.”
“Did you try her voice?” demanded Carlota again, her voice a warning of
smouldering anger.
He nodded his head happily. “She has a very appealing quality, a light
lyric soprano, well pitched and true. Of course she has had a lot of
training.”
Carlota deliberately swept a jar of golden tulips from the top of the
piano to the floor in crashing fragments. She herself had bought the
jar for him, a squat plaster one, painted in dull-gold and Tuscan fruit
tints. It had been her whim to keep it filled with flowers. There
had been a small urn like it before a statue of Daphne in the garden
at Tittani, and she had always as a child kept fresh flowers there,
she told him. Now, it lay like a symbol of broken faith at her feet.
As Ames swung about in amazement, she drew on her gloves with superb
indifference.
“Will you kindly tell me the meaning of this?” he demanded hotly.
“It means--nothing, signor, nothing at all. I have an engagement
to-day. I cannot take my lesson from you.”
But he saw the trouble and pain in her eyes instantly and caught her
hands in his.
“Now, listen, Carlota, you know all this means to me--to us. They would
never have come at all if it hadn’t been for you. You heard what she
said. Chandos is the English painter downstairs. He’s heard you sing
and has told them about it.”
Slowly the tears gathered heavily to her lashes. She had given him the
full benefit of all she had learned from the great Jacobelli, and now
he would give it to this girl for a few paltry dollars.
“Why do you have to take her when she has everything? Go down through
the Quarter and find some poor singer. Take even the children. But give
it freely, not for money. I cannot bear to see you acting like old
Pietro before such people. Grateful? Do you think that Jacobelli was
ever grateful in his life?”
“What do you know about Signor Jacobelli?” he demanded teasingly.
“You’re angry because she called you a city sparrow, my nightingale,
and you’re right, but I can’t afford to turn down such a chance. I’ve
got to live here if I am to work on my opera and succeed, and this is
enough for me.”
“You may do as you like, but I shall not come here as long as that girl
takes lessons from you.”
“But can’t you see how it will benefit us both?” He stopped before her
impatiently. “You are my star pupil. Perhaps I might even persuade Mrs.
Nevins to let you sing at one of her musicales. If I could get her
interested in my opera, think what it would mean for me, dear--”
“I did not think you were of the kind who seek patronage,” she said
slowly. “I will not come again. Not for one instant would I sing
for that woman. You have no ideals. I believed you were altogether
different.”
“Carlota, come back,” he called after her; but the door shut with a
slam that sent Ptolemy scurrying for cover, and he stopped short,
frowning with a quick, boyish resentment at her suspicion of him.
Although there had never been a definite declaration of love between
them, yet their whole acquaintance had ripened in an atmosphere
of romantic glamour, a piquant, elusive mutual acceptance of each
other idealized. He could not have understood the surging resentment
in Carlota’s heart as she went uptown to take her real lesson from
Jacobelli. Once in the Square she had tossed the jonquils and daffodils
broadcast to the children around the fountain. Her mind was a tumult of
emotions, of hot rebellion against Ames’s acceptance of her coming as
a gift of Fate that was his due. She knew her identity was a mystery
to him. He had told her of asking Phelps, and being told she was a
protégée of the Marchese Veracci a young Italian singer in whom he was
interested; that was all.
He had all of the artist’s selfish point of view, she thought. He had
not even caught the personal side of her anger. He saw merely the
professional jealousy of one singer towards another in her antagonism
towards Nathalie Nevins, and this attitude added fuel to Carlota’s
raging indignation against him. He could not even grasp or understand
all that the visits had meant to her, all that she had given him
gladly. He had not even been musician enough to distinguish between
the quality of her voice and that of Nathalie. And suddenly it flashed
across her that possibly Jacobelli was right; that she did lack power
and dramatic force, feeling, passion, all that made the really great
singer.
When she reached the studio she flung the outer door wide even as Maria
might have done. Signor Jacobelli was at the piano amusing himself.
The taunting, passionate notes of the “Habanera” crashed upon her as
she stood a moment transformed utterly from the somber, unawakened
girl he had last met. And in an instant she had picked up the melody,
provocative, imperative, daring, sauntering into the room with all of
Carmen’s tricks at her finger-tips, at her tongue’s end. Jacobelli
turned quickly, catching the new note of passion and power. She did not
appear even to see him, but flung her whole soul into the song and the
underlying tragedy of its motif.
“Brava!” murmured the old maestro, huskily. “Try now the ‘Dance of the
Tambourines.’”
As she finished the gypsy song, he sprang from the bench, kissing her
hands in ecstasy.
“I do not know, I do not ask from whence this has come to you, but I
thank God it is there at last, the divine note for which I have prayed.
So you shall sing for Mr. Ward at his dinner, ma bella, and take him by
storm.”
Carlota’s eyes glowed with anger as she threw aside her cloak and hat.
She looked for the instant like a reincarnation of the youthful Paoli,
as he remembered her back at La Scala.
“I will not sing for him or be shown off to him any more,” she told him
hotly. “I detest him and all people like him.”
Jacobelli threw back his head, laughing delightedly.
“Aha! Temper?” he cried. “It is the beginning of temperament, thanks
be to God. We expect it, my dear, sooner or later. The artistic
temperament is like the resistless forces of nature, the storm, the
volcano, the tidal wave, the lightning. Life would be tame without them
in spite of the danger, would it not? We crave the thrill. Never have
I heard the great dramatic quality before in your voice. Ah, you shall
sing all the glorious colorful rôles they have had to shelve because
there was no one to sing them.”
Carlota had turned from him and gone to the west windows, the
tears blinding her sight. Even the agony of one’s heart, then, had
a commercial value. Life was merely the arena where one gave all
for applause, where human emotions merely added to the thrill of
suspense. The deeper the reality of the knife-thrust, the cleverer the
counterfeit acting.
“I hate it all,” she sobbed brokenly. “I wish we could go back to
Tittani. Tell them my voice is hopeless, maestro, and let me go.”
Jacobelli lit a cigarette deliberately, eyeing her thoughtfully. He
tipped a chair backwards and seated himself, rocking slowly on two of
its legs.
“Who is he?” he asked gently.
Carlota looked back at him in angry silence, startled into caution at
his words, but he waved one plump hand at her airily and reassuringly.
“Remember, my child, I have known both your mother and grandmother.
History moves in recurrent cycles, even the history of human hearts,
and particularly when we consider heredity. I talked with Margherita
Paoli when first she took Bianca from the convent. She told me her
theory of life for a woman of genius and I agreed with her perfectly.
Love in its perfection is the supreme sacrifice of self, art is the
elevation of self, the crowning of self. They are at war eternally. So
I told her, and she said she would keep Bianca safe behind the wall of
Tittani while she studied. Never should the danger of love approach her
until her success was assured, and this creed was impressed upon your
mother, my dear, with what result? Even while we two fools prated, she
was listening in the garden to the boy Peppino and was gone before her
mother even guessed their love.”
Carlota turned back into the room suddenly, her eyes brilliant with
eager appeal.
“Tell me who John Tennant was?” she asked him. “Why did my nurse use
to tell me that no woman could escape over the wall of Tittani without
meeting the tragic fate of the Princess Fiametta? Oh, you are all
so blind! You treat me like a baby, and never think I hear or see
anything. Don’t you suppose I ever think or reason? I used to go down
to the end of the garden looking seaward, to that little stone house
where they told me he had lived and died. Once I went in when I found
the door unlocked. Everything was just as he had left it, and while I
was wondering what it all meant, my grandmother came in from the little
walk along the terrace above and I knew she had been weeping. Then
Maria told me only his name. Who was he?”
Jacobelli made a magnificent gesture.
“I may not tell you. The secret of his being there was only known to
his friend Wallace, the Marchese, and myself. I found out by accident
when I sought her and implored her to return to the stage. She loved
him, and he never even knew that she was near him in the garden or that
it was her love and bounty he lived upon. Ah, the wonderful woman she
was! Only as he died, unconscious in her arms, could she speak to him
or caress him, and he never knew. Think of her pride, imperial in its
abnegation.”
“But my mother was happier.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Who can say? Women are complex. Bianca was all tenderness, a flower
of love. She did not pass the walls to seek adventure, but to escape
from ambition. When I first met her fresh from La Pietà and heard your
grandmother’s plans, I thought, never, never, with such eyes and lips.
And I told her the lines from ‘Romeo et Juliette’; you know them?
“‘With love’s light wing did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out.’”
“I am glad she escaped!” flamed back Carlota. “Even my grandmother, who
knew in her own heart that love was all to a woman, would have shut her
own child away from its beauty and truth--”
“From its agony and devastating influence,” Jacobelli protested
placidly. “To the woman of genius this is so, my dear. You cannot
discuss it logically because you have never experienced love. Even I
have never loved to distraction, always with reason, and I have been
most happy. I have buried two beautiful, gifted women who adored me.”
Carlota turned suddenly away, afraid of the flood of words on her lips
that she longed to pour out. It would only arouse suspicion against
her if she went too far, and already the reaction was setting in, and
she felt a great weariness of body and spirit. Were they not right,
after all, she thought, as she stood by the window looking riverward?
Somewhere she had read that the yearning after ideals was merely the
soul’s subconscious memory of another life. Was it then foolish to
seek a path to the stars through the world of everyday selfishness and
commercialism? Griffeth accepted patronage gladly for the sake of his
operetta. She would have had him finish it in the high seclusion of
the garret studio and win recognition and fame as his right once it
had been submitted to the directors of the Opera. Instead he must seek
the favor of persons like Mrs. Nevins, must add the weight of their
influence before the magic doors would open to him. And in order to
win Mrs. Nevins’s interest and friendship, he must give lessons to her
daughter and constantly flatter and compromise with his own critical
faculty.
She who loved directness and clarity of vision and the straight, white
road ahead, faced suddenly the devious, twisting path that led to
success and popularity. Yet there never was a straight road that led to
a mountain peak, she thought. Always the winding way, the compromise
with risk and danger until one reached the summit of desire. She smiled
slowly, and turned to Jacobelli, smoking in long, leisurely puffs until
she should have changed her mind.
“I will go to Mr. Ward’s dinner and sing for him,” she said.
He laid aside his pipe.
“The caprice and passion of the woman always move in a circle. Wait
but patiently, and behold, she is back at the starting-point, and is
willing. My dear, you show common sense and astuteness. Forget all this
love nonsense. I know not what had roused you, but put it away from
you. Ogden Ward can open every door for you in the operatic world. I
would not be too indifferent and petulant with him. Ah, if I could only
teach you your grandmother’s queenly way, the mingling of alluring
charm and condescension, the aloofness of her favor--”
Carlota drew on her gloves, watching him the while.
“I may toss roses from the top of the wall; that is it, signor?” she
said gravely. “I shall try to remember.”