IN a little _pension_ on the rue Neuve des Petits Champs, Rose Temple
had been working patiently at her music for six months and more,
studying under one of the great Italian teachers, a man who had
trained more than one prima donna and was, therefore, chary of his
encouragement. The enthusiasm which she had brought to her task having
been gradually dispelled by sharp disappointments, she had struggled
on, determined to succeed at last.
The first test of her voice before the maestro and his French critics
had been a failure, a failure so complete that she came home to weep
her heart out on the faithful shoulder of the elderly cousin who was
her chaperon and comforter. The weakness of a voice, beautiful but not
yet fully trained, her trepidation at singing before the maestro and
his assembled judges, together with the long strain of preparation, had
united in her undoing. She came back to the _pension_ without a word of
encouragement, feeling at heart that she would never sing a note again.
She sat down, laying her head on the little writing-table, amid a wild
confusion of Miss Emily Carter’s pens and papers, and gave way to her
despair. “I shall never sing again!” she said, “never--I’m a miserable
failure; I haven’t any more voice than a sparrow, and there’s all that
money wasted, thrown away!”
Miss Emily eyed her quietly. She had the intense family pride which
is nurtured in the State of Virginia; she did not need to be told,
she knew that Rose had the loveliest voice in the world. As for
these nasty, little, fat, insinuating Frenchmen! She took off her
spectacles and smoothed her hair back from her temples; it was done
as they did hair forty years ago; it matched her immaculate turn-over
lace collar and hair brooch. “You’ll blot my letter, Rose,” she said
calmly, with a little drawl that was inimitable; “I don’t see what
you’re crying about, it will make your nose red; as for these horrid
little Parisians, they know about as much about you as they do about
heaven--which isn’t enough to get there!”
In spite of herself Rose laughed feebly. “You’re the most prejudiced
person I know, Cousin Emily!”
“Prejudiced?” Miss Carter’s nostrils quivered scornfully, “I wasn’t
raised within forty miles of Richmond for nothing, Rose Temple! Don’t
you suppose I know a gentleman when I see one? What in the world can
you expect from that person if he is a singing master? He wears a
solitaire ring on his little finger and a red necktie. I reckon I’ve
got eyes if I do wear spectacles.”
“But he’s trained half the great singers of the world, Cousin Emily,
and at first he was so kind about my voice--to-day--” Rose winked back
the hot tears--“to-day he never said a word!”
“Pig!” ejaculated Miss Carter unmoved.
Rose laughed hysterically. “I shall never sing; I’d better take to
washing and ironing for a living!”
“You’d make a fortune,” retorted Miss Carter ironically; “while you
were mooning you’d scorch all the shirt bosoms and smash the collars.”
“You’re not a bit encouraging; no one is!” Rose said helplessly,
leaning back in her chair; “it makes my heart ache to think of wasting
poor father’s money so!”
“And I reckon he’d give the whole of it to keep your little finger
from hurting; he thinks you’re a chip of the moon. And how in the
world do you know you’ve wasted it yet?” continued her cousin, calmly
indignant; “perhaps you didn’t sing well to-day; is that any reason you
won’t to-morrow?”
Rose looked at the angular figure opposite, and the color came again
slowly to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. “I’m so glad you came,
Cousin Emily!” she exclaimed; “without you I should have just given up,
they looked so--so indifferent, those men with their eye-glasses and
their notebooks and their stare.”
“Stare? I should think so!” replied Miss Carter severely; “I’ll put a
Frenchman against anything for staring. I believe myself that Paris is
a Sodom and Gomorrah boiled into one, let me tell you! How any nice
sweet girl can marry one of them-- Rose, if anything should ever induce
me at any time to think of marrying one, clap me into an insane asylum,
you hear?”
And Rose, burying her face in her hands, laughed until she cried.
But without Miss Carter and Aunt Hannah her courage would have failed
her often in the months which followed. She was put back at the
alphabet of music and worked with the beginners. More than one night
she secretly cried herself to sleep without daring to tell Cousin Emily
of her weakness. Homesickness, too, pinched her and took the color
from her cheeks, but she worked bravely on. She had reached Paris in
June and she had failed at her trial in September. The months which
followed were crowded to the brim, and she tried to shut her heart and
her ears to news from home, except that which concerned her father.
The judge’s letters were purposely cheerful and optimistic, he said
so little about financial difficulties that it seemed like a troubled
dream to Rose; she never quite realized all it meant to her future.
At last, after many months, her instructor told her one morning that
he should bring some competent judges to hear her again and, if she
succeeded at this second test, he should try to give her a great
opportunity to win her place in the world as a singer. Rose’s heart
thrilled. The great man said little, but at last she perceived that he
believed in her in spite of her failure, that her voice had finally won
his confidence. A word from him was more than a volume from another; it
meant success or failure. The girl, full of her dreams of singing and
redeeming all with her voice, trembled all over and turned pale. There
was a great excitement at the little _pension_ that night; confident
though she was, Miss Carter secretly wiped away a tear, and they both
worked late to give some fresh touches to the girl’s white gown which
brought it up to date; it was a year old, and not made in Paris! They
began to see such differences, to recognize the enchanting creations
in the show-windows and out walking on the fashionable women on the
boulevards.
However, Cousin Emily had her opinion about its owner’s appearance in
that same old white frock, and she stole out and bought a single rose
for the young singer to wear the next afternoon. Aunt Hannah helped
dress her; it was a great occasion; the little flat looked as though
a whirlwind had struck it, and at last the two went out in great
trepidation to keep the appointment. Secretly Miss Emily longed to
give those Frenchmen a piece of her mind about criticizing the voice
of a sweet young girl, but she only retired discreetly to a corner and
looked on with a peculiar moisture on her spectacles which required the
constant use of her handkerchief.
* * * * *
As Rose ceased singing and the last clear notes of her voice floated
into the distances of the great empty concert-hall, the thrill of its
sweetness, its purity, its young confident power, seemed to fill the
very atmosphere of the place with exquisite music; it could not quite
pass away into silence, it remained at last, if not in the ears, in
the souls of the listeners, a little group to the right of the stage
who had gathered there to hear the wonderful pupil, his youthful prima
donna, the great gift which, he believed, the new world had for the old.
In the midst of her song she had forgotten herself, her audience,
her first failure, even the world itself, while her young ardent
soul poured out its joy and its grief in those splendid notes. Love,
that great interpreter of the heart, had unlocked hers to sorrow,
she sang with the heart of the sorrowful; she was, first of all, as
Allestree felt, an impersonation of youth, and she sang with the soul
of youth which hopes forever; she loved, purely, unselfishly, gently,
and she sang with the love of the world on her lips, and singing
thus was supremely lovely; what matter if the old white dress was a
little out of fashion? She was a figure as symbolic of youth with its
splendid hopes, its faith, its untried strength, as she was the very
personification of beautiful womanhood.
No one spoke, no one applauded, but not an eye was dry.
But to Rose, whose ears were not filled with her own music, the silence
which followed it came with a shock of terrible revulsion. She waited
a moment in keen suspense, but no one spoke, no one moved; the wave
of silence that followed the wave of sound engulfed her hopes, she
remembered that first disappointment. Bitter dismay swept over her, she
turned away to hide her emotion, but the maestro crossed the stage at
that instant and held out his hand; he could not praise her but there
was actually a tear in his eye.
Rose looked up, and reading his face burst into tears of joy, her hopes
suddenly fulfilled.
Then the party of judges broke out with a round of applause and one
little Frenchman, with a polished pink bald head and mustaches,
shouted: “Brava!”
In the end they crowded around her and overwhelmed her with
compliments; they were eager to invite her to a supper and drink
her health in champagne, but the staid Virginia cousin, in the
old-fashioned black bonnet and the old black alpaca gown, which
outraged Paris without hiding the good heart beneath it, frowned on
this hilarity; her deep-seated suspicion of the Parisian in general had
not been dissipated by this burst of applause. She insisted that Rose,
who was trembling with excitement and the strain of the long hours of
training, should go straight back to their little apartment to rest. A
decision too full of wisdom for even Rose, eager though she was for
the sweet meed of praise, to resist it.
They drove back in a fiacre, a wild extravagance which they ventured in
view of the great success and the immediate prospects of a fortune; the
cousin felt that they were immediate.
“You all were always talented,” she said to Rose, as they drove down
the rue de Rivoli; “your mother could do anything; we always said so.
Cousin Sally Carter, too, is going to be an artist, and no one ever
made preserves like Cousin Anna’s! I reckon it’s in the family, Rose.”
“Oh, Cousin Emily!” Rose sighed, and hid her face on the alpaca
shoulder, “oh, if I can only, only sing so well that there shall be no
more terrible trouble for father!”
“Now, don’t you worry about the judge, child,” Cousin Emily replied
soothingly; “it will all come out right and, anyway, the best families
haven’t money now-a-days!” she added with ineffable disdain, “it’s very
vulgar.”
“I think I’d risk having it, though!” Rose said, with a sigh.
She was really in a dream. The softness of spring was in the atmosphere
as they drove through the gay streets, and all the trees in the
garden of the Tuileries were delicately fringed with green; the voices
of children, the sounds of laughter, now and then a snatch of song,
reminded them that it was a holiday. Rose thought of home; the Persian
lilac must be budding, the tulip trees, of course, were in flower;
a pang of homesickness seized her, a longing to see the old house
again--ah, there was the sorrow of it, could they keep the old house
much longer? With these thoughts came others, deeply perturbed, which
she tried to thrust away. She knew of Margaret’s sudden death, but
she had heard but little of it, of Fox nothing. Her father’s letters
excluded the whole matter; Mrs. Allestree’s were chary in mention of
it, and from Robert there was no word on the subject. Gerty English,
strangely enough, had not written since Margaret’s death, and Rose
could only piece together the dim outlines of a tragedy which touched
her to the soul. There had been moments when she had been bitter
against poor Margaret, had held her responsible, now she thought of her
with pity.
As these things floated before her, in a confused dream of sorrow and
regret, she was scarcely conscious of Cousin Emily’s chatter, or of
the streets through which they passed, but presently they were set
down at their own door and she paid the cabman; Cousin Emily’s French
was excellent but it belonged exclusively to the classroom and the
phrase-book, and no one in Paris understood it, a fact which bewildered
her more than any of her other experiences.
They found the _pension_ disturbed by a fire in an adjoining house,
and Aunt Hannah was sitting on top of Rose’s trunk with her bonnet on,
waiting to be assured that the flames could not reach her.
“It’s all out, Aunt Hannah,” Rose assured her, laughing; “the concierge
says it was out half an hour ago.”
“He don’ know nuthin’ about it, Miss Rose; he ain’t sure dat he’s a
liar, an’ I knows he is, bekase I’se caught him at it,” the old woman
replied firmly; “de place might be afire sure nuff. It was one ob dem
’lection wires dat set de odder house off, an’ dis place is full ob
dem; I don’ tole him ter cut ’em loose, an’ he keep on jabberin’ like a
monkey; I ain’t got no manner ob use fo’ dese French people no-ways!”
“Nor has Cousin Emily!” laughed Rose, taking off her hat and tossing
it to Aunt Hannah, while she passed her hand over her bright hair with
a light, deft touch which seemed to bring every ripple into a lovelier
disorder; “the poor concierge is a good soul, and he does make us
comfortable here.”
“Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t!” said Aunt Hannah grudgingly; “dese
men folks allus waits on a pretty girl, honey, but I ’lows he’d cheat
yo’ jest de same; I’se got my eye on him sure!”
“I wish you’d take off your bonnet and get my trunk open,” retorted
Rose good naturedly; “then we’ll see if we can put the concierge in
it--if he misbehaves!”
“My sakes, honey, I done clean forgot ter gib yo’ dis letter; it’s a
telegram, I reckon; it come jest befo’ de fire broke out, an’ I’se been
settin’ on it ter keep it safe.”
It was a cablegram, and Rose stretched out an eager hand for it, with
a thrill of anticipation; it seemed as if her father must be reaching
out to her across the seas, that he already knew and rejoiced with her
for, surely, all his prejudices would dissolve at the assurance of her
success.
She opened it with trembling fingers, a smile on her lips. It fluttered
and fell to the floor; it was a cablegram to summon her home, the judge
was very ill.