CHAPTER II
AfterWard had gone the old Italian maestro seated himself at the piano, improvising as he always did when he was disturbed. It was an enormous old ebony instrument, mellow and vibrant in its response to his touch. He did not even look up as Carlota leaned her elbows upon a pile of dusty folios, watching him anxiously. Finally she drew a quick, impatient breath.
“I wish he would never come here again.”
“It is customary,” Jacobelli shrugged his expansive shoulders. “You are too sensitive, my dear. It is you who are conferring a favor in permitting this person to provide the means for your education. You will return to him, in the hour of your triumph, every penny it has been his privilege to advance at this time.”
“Why does he come here and sit looking at me in such a way? In the courtyard at home there were little lizards that came out early in the morning, gray and cold, with eyes like his, green in the light. I was always afraid of putting my hand on one of them around the fountain.”
Jacobelli struck a minor chord, avoiding her eyes.
“Because he is a man, and you are growing beautiful. You will become accustomed to this sort of thing. All men will love you, or seem to. It is the compliment paid to women who are great artistes. Your grandmother was adored in her day. Kings and princes knelt at her shrine, and fought for her favor. Even I was infatuated with her. You must learn to smile impersonally and receive homage.”
“Then it is not—love?” Carlota asked doubtfully. “I heard what you said to him about her. Why did you say that, about her suffering and sacrifice? I never remember her like that. She was wonderful. She seemed to give out radiance and warmth like the sunlight. Wasn’t she happy?”
Jacobelli’s hands were flung up suddenly, and he laughed at her.
“My dear, who may say when a woman is happy or when she is not. Sometimes they find their greatest happiness in their most supreme suffering. She was divine, that is enough. As for love, Carlotina mia, it is merely Life’s plaything. It is the toy we give to youth, but never, never to genius. The rabble amuses itself with what it calls love. But genius is sufficient unto itself. It is the celestial fire. It does not seek a mortal torch upon its altar.”
“You said you would rather see me dead—”began Carlota slowly, when the little electric bell at the outer door rang lightly, announcing Maria Roma at her customary hour of five. As always, she followed it by half opening the door, peering around with an arch, reconnoitering glance.
“Do I intrude?” she asked, with her beaming smile, and entered impressively, always with the dramatic action as if the orchestra had sounded her motif. She shook one forefinger impressively at Carlota. “You loiter and take up the maestro’s time, gossip and loiter when you should be studying.”
But Jacobelli waved aside the admonition with one ample movement of his large, plump hand. As Carlota went to the inner room for her cloak and hat, he spoke in an undertone.
“Ward is becoming very much interested in her. She treats him with indifference. You must teach her diplomacy. She has too much arrogance of youth, and absolutely no gratitude for what he is doing for her.”
Maria’s brilliant dark eyes narrowed with comprehensive amusement.
“You ask the impossible, Guido. I who have known all three, Margherita, Bianca, and this glorious child, tell you the truth, and you will remember what I say. You can no more teach the heart of a Paoli to keep its temperamentwithin bounds than you can yoke the thunder-clouds and lightning that sweep down over our Trentino.”
“And the responsibility is ours,” said Jacobelli, with a deep exhalation of his cigarette. “Given this nature, we are to keep her a prisoner behind the wall of Tittani, eh?”
Maria sank deeply into the velvet-cushioned chair beside him, and the two smiled at each other reminiscently.
“It was a high wall,” she sighed at length. “I remember your last visit there, Guido, before the child was born, five years I think it was. Bianca was a flower then. Such flaming hair and dark eyes, the true Florentine type. She was more like Tittani in her looks. Carlota is a throwback to the grandmother. Ah, my Guido, was there ever a woman like her? Even at the last, before he died, when her heart was torn with agony of renunciation—”
“She lost her voice,” Jacobelli spoke with finality. “Yet Ward would tell me love is the great fulfillment. Did she ever sing again? No. She buried her art with her love in the grave of her poet after he had denied her to the world. You and I, Maria Roma, who know of this, must protect this child against the traitor in her own nature.”
Maria sighed doubtfully. She was the large,vivid type of the Italian peasant, richly developed by success and circumstance. Years before, Sforza, director of La Scala, had journeyed with friends to a mountain section of the Trentino. In the purple twilight a voice had drifted down to them from a band of vintage workers, homeward bound. It was Maria Roma at eighteen, a buoyant, deep-breasted bacchante, her black hair hanging in thick clusters of curls around her radiant face.
Enrico Sforza had loved her, more perhaps for her ardent faithfulness and responsiveness. She had achieved a sensation in contralto rôles and he had interested La Paoli in his peasant love. In middle age, after his death, Maria had retired to live at the Villa Tittani with the old diva. Here she had shared with her in the tragedy of her final years. Fifty years before, the story of Margherita Paoli and her love for John Tennant, the English poet, had been part of the romance of Italy. Her beauty and genius had opened every door of success to her. Even on the threshold of womanhood she had been given all that ambition could demand from life, and turning in the highest hour of her triumphs, she had forsaken the world for a year, giving the full gift of her love to Tennant.
Suddenly she had returned, restless and hungering for her art. As Maria knew, Tennant had been jealous of her voice and the life which he could not share, had demanded that she give up her career for the sake of their love, and return with him to England. And she had laughed at him. Love could not bring full completeness and happiness to a woman of genius, she had said. It could not satisfy her for the loss of the divine fire. Tennant had left Italy, and five years later she married Count Tittani. Bianca, the mother of Carlota, had been born at the old villa overlooking the Campagna. She had spent her childhood here, and in the convent of Maria Pietà at the head of the ancient ilex avenue leading up from Mondragone. Tittani had died when she was nine, leaving La Paoli the prestige of his name and wealth combined with her own full measure of maturity in her art.
It was at this time that Maria had come nearest to her confidence. Word came from England to them that Tennant had been stricken blind, and in the midst of a gala performance of “Traviata,” La Paoli had left all and gone to him. He had refused to see her when she reached London. Bertrand Wallace, his closest friend, had told her simply enough that he was without means, that he longed togo to Italy where “he might feel the sun on his face,” and she had entered into the splendid conspiracy that glorified the end of her life.
The Villa Tittani faced the Campagna with a lofty, blank wall. Beyond it stretched terraced gardens, winding alleys of cypress and ilexes, a place of enchantment, with the never-ending music of falling waters in the distance, of hidden fountains in grottoes, and cascades that fell over ancient steps in ripples of silver. Yet all its beauty was dominated by its wall, blank on one side, terraced on the garden side into long, steep depths of mystery, of infinite green vistas that lost their way in the cypress gloom of the lower distances.
Here Wallace brought his friend, the blind poet, to the little house near the end of the wall where the view opened seaward. Two old servants of the Tittani had cared for him until his passing, and here La Paoli could come and watch him from a distance, unseen or suspected in the largesse of her love by the man whose faith she had betrayed for fame. It was characteristic of her that even in her grief and isolation from him, she seemed to find a supreme, almost fierce, satisfaction in the tragic immolation of her own happiness for his sake. He had died finally, unconscious, on her breast, and she had never sung again.
“You see, Maria, I have proved the truth of it in my own heart’s blood,” she had said, “A woman cannot serve two gods. If Bianca has my voice, help me to teach her this: no man is content with half of a woman’s love or nature. If she desires to attain to the highest art, she must sacrifice love.”
Within six months after she had left the shelter of the convent Bianca had married Peppino Trelango, son of a dead patriot. The Contessa had cared for him through his boyhood, because she had heard him playing on his violin once on the old quay at Pontecova where centuries before the body of the boy count, Giovanni Borgia, had borne witness against his brother in the dawn. When Bianca came home, she had met him in the old gardens, a boy of nineteen, like one of the marble fauns come to life to teach her youth’s heritage. When the Contessa returned from a trip to her favorite midsummer retreat at Isola Bella, she had found the two gone, and Maria desolate with despair.
It was from this romance that Carlota had been born. After the death of Peppino in an Algerian skirmish, Bianca had returned to the villa behind the old rose-colored wall with her child. She had lived in the gardens with the memories of her love, a silent, smiling, statelygirl who baffled the vivid, emotional La Paoli by the elusive sensitiveness of her nature.
“She is the wraith of my passion for the love I denied,” the Contessa would declare. “I starved for him, and trampled the desire with my pride while I bore her to Tittani. She is the very spirit of renunciation, Maria, and she will drive me to madness with her silence and resignation. Carlota is not like her. She is a flame, a beautiful rosebud, all light and movement. She is like I was, God keep her.”
Carlota was four when they bore her mother down to the old tomb of the Tittani. She could remember her voice at night when she bent over her to kiss her, and the fall of her long, soft hair over her face. Sometimes in their walks through the gardens, in the quiet years of her girlhood, she would come to the old tomb set into the hillside, its iron gates overgrown with vines, and she would lean her cheek against them. Assunta, her nurse, would scold her for not keeping her thoughts on the spiritual.
“Ah, a little that was my mother lies here,” Carlota would answer. “I may love it, Assunta, without sinning, may I not, just her beautiful hair even?”
After Italy entered the war, the villa had been turned into a hospital, and the fortune of the Contessa laid at the feet of “La Patria.”
“Still, there is some left,” she had told Maria at the time of her own departure. Strong in spirit and dominant, she had ruled to the end, planning and directing Carlota’s future. “I have given the child a heritage and training that are priceless. If you have to, sell the jewels in the cinque cento chest. They are for her. I have not even looked at them since he died. Take her to America, Maria. Find there Guido Jacobelli. He was a boy when I made my début, before your time, the gala performance of ‘Rigoletto.’ I was a wonderful Gilda, Maria. Later I gave him his first start. He is not one who forgets. You will go to him in New York and he will find you a patron. I have written to the Marchese Veracci to expect you and see that you are lodged fittingly. No economy. Surround her with beauty and comfort while she studies, but keep her from love until she has won success. Her mother sacrificed all for Peppino’s kiss. If I were able I would keep her here behind the wall of Tittani and never let her see the face of a man whom she might love. Dust and ashes all, Maria. The greatest and most enduring is the memory of a lost love.”
After the closing of the old villa, Carlota and Signora Roma had come to New York. Maria had been prodigal in her expenditures. Shehad taken an expensive studio and had lavished the tenderest care on her charge.
“The art quarters of Europe, cara mia,” she would say to her airily when Carlota protested, “have been filled for generations with what?—failures. Boy and girl aspirants, pitiful little garret Pierrots and Columbines, starving upon hopes that never materialized. Art is greedy. It demands all of your nerve, force and vitality. To come out of the training of the next four years a victor, you must pamper yourself. Dress well, eat well, feed your love of beauty as well as your stomach. Remember, ‘white hyacinths for the soul as well as bread for the body.’ You will be a slave to your art, and must keep the fires burning.”
“But you will use up all we have,” Carlota had protested.
“What then?” Maria had demanded proudly. “You have only a small fortune left. You must have thousands, tens of thousands before you bow to your first night’s audience.”
They had met the old Marchese Veracci the first week of their arrival. Few there were in the Washington Square section of the city who were not familiar with the stately Old-World figure of the Marchese. He was as welcome in the crowded Sicilian quarter below Fourth Street as in the corridors of the Brevoortor Lafayette. He held his court daily at the fountain in the center of the Square. Always with a fresh boutonnière and a smile and courtly word for every dark-eyed child who laughed back at him. Sometimes, when he strolled past the bust of Garibaldi, he would leave a little spray of flowers on the pedestal. After dinner he never failed to stroll out into the twilight and lift his soul in salute to the cross of light that gleamed on the memorial tower above the trees.
“It is the one spot in the whole city,” he told them, “that holds the Old-World glamour and charm, yet I would not have you and Carlota living down here. The lines of demarcation are too blurred between the workers and the dreamers. Then, too, there are the dancing shapes that come to stare and ridicule. There is a contagion of play here that breaks the concentration you must put into your study, my child. Keep away from it at this period. Later, I could wish you nothing better than to share in the spirit of comradeship in art and beauty, yes, and most of all, in humanity. That you will find down here, no matter how others try to detract from the atmosphere, like the very small boys who will ever toss pebbles at the stained-glass windows of the saints.”
Maria Roma had agreed fervently to anything he said. His delighted enthusiasm satisfied her that the old Contessa had chosen rightly in making him joint guardian with her over Carlota. Guido Jacobelli had retired, he had told her over their first luncheon en tête-à-tête at the Italian Club. Money would never tempt him to teach. Nothing but brilliant genius in a pupil could ever lure him from his retreat to give them the full benefit of his years of experience and study.
“I know him well, and of them all he is still the wizard, the maestro. Even now, his word on a voice would open the gates of opportunity to any singer. Casanova, of the Opera here, bows to his dictum. If it were anybody but Margherita Paoli who calls to me, I would say no, but as it is, ma bella, we will go. Two places I know where we may find him, at his old studio in town and his country home at Arrochar, on Staten Island. We will go there.”
The visit had proven Carlota’s crucial hour. Maria had hovered over her excitedly, feeling that upon the great old maestro’s verdict lay the entire future fate of her career. The Marchese had called for them and had accompanied them out to Jacobelli’s home. It was typical of his simplicity and love of nature. On the wooded heights above Kill von Kull at Arrochar,lay a small colony of Italian artists and musicians. Their homes were like miniature villas perched above a smaller bay of Naples when the myriad lights gleamed on the shipping and distant Jersey hills.
As they walked up the quiet hill street from the station, Carlota’s dark eyes had sparkled with memories. Surely in this perfect fall day, with the vivid blue of a cloudless sky above the deep crimson and gold of autumn foliage, there was a semblance of the Villa Tittani’s beauty. A rock wall covered with brilliant red creeper vines surrounded the garden. It seemed neglected, with shrubbery straggling in groups, unclipped and straying. The stone flower urns were overgrown with rank, clambering vines. In the southeast corner a dancing faun poised with wary, pointed ears, as if listening seaward. When the Marchese tried to open the outer vestibule door of the enclosed veranda, two stately Italian greyhounds rose leisurely and eyed the callers questioningly.
Within they had found Jacobelli living alone with his memories. Carlota never forgot the picture that he made, welcoming them into his wide, sunlit studio. Swarthy, stout, curly-haired, frowning at her from heavy eyebrows, he had seemed to gauge and grasp her whole capabilities in one swift, cursory glance. Shehad been caressed and encouraged all of her life, but now, for the first time, she felt her confidence shaken as she waited by the piano, facing the piercing eyes and uncompromising glare of the old maestro. Never once, during the two years of study under him that followed that first visit, had she shaken off that first impression. Eccentric, proud, profoundly conscious of his power to make or unmake queens of the operatic world, he had been a revelation to her from that day.
The Marchese had pleaded for her eloquently, showing the letter he had received from La Paoli a few weeks before her death. Jacobelli had listened to it in silence, staring fixedly at the girl. She was very like her grandmother in appearance, he thought. Behind her stood a towering old terra-cotta jar filled with scarlet autumn leaves. She looked out at the sea view, her eyes filled with a dreaming longing. Her hair was heavy and lustrous, growing back from a low, broad forehead with the shell-like outline one sees in the portraits of Beatrice or one of Del Sarto’s girl saints. Her eyes were long and shadowy, heavy-lidded, aloof. When she was interested or startled, they opened widely, a deep, warm brown color, their darkness made more vivid by the rare rose red of her lips and the peculiar jasmineclearness of her skin. But it was something beyond mere beauty and grace that arrested Jacobelli’s interest. There was a sense of suppressed vitality about her, the insistent promise of the unusual, of some compelling magnetism that lay behind her silence and repression. Suddenly he seated himself at the long bench, and struck a chord for her pitch.
“Sing,” he ordered. “First, a long scale.”
Carlota had hesitated, looking to Maria for sympathy. Might she not sing, for this supreme trial, some famous aria? But Signora Roma had raised both hands in hushed rebuke. They were before the final tribunal. The outcome was on the knees of the gods. But as the full, vibrant soprano rose to the scale, Jacobelli struck a crashing chord and leapt from the bench, clasping his arms about the slim figure at his side.
“Ah, Sanctissima Maria, it is there!” he shouted. “It is the voice of Paoli come to life once more! My beautiful, my marvel, ah, what we will not make of you! Sing, cara mia, sing again for me. No, so!”
For over an hour Carlota sang for him, while Maria sat by the deep bay window, weeping from sheer happiness, and the old Marchese strolled to and fro, stroking the greyhounds, and smoking incessantly, keepingtime as he smiled at the success of his experiment.
The fruition of that first visit had come richly in the two years that followed it. Carlota was eighteen now, with not alone the years of her grandmother’s careful teaching, but Jacobelli’s unceasing discipline and watchfulness as her voice ripened and developed. One year more and she would be ready for her début, he said. It was this final year she dreaded, with Ward’s visits to the studio becoming more frequent and his interest in her losing its cloak of patronage.
She was silent on this day, almost during the entire homeward walk across the Park. Their apartment had been Maria’s choice, selected against the better judgment of even the Marchese. He had advised a smaller, less expensive suite farther uptown, but in a conservative section. Maria had cast the suggestion from her scornfully. For the struggling student any environment was of secondary consideration, but for the sole pupil of Guido Jacobelli, the protégée of Ogden Ward, there must be a gilded cage. Between Fifth Avenue and Madison in the upper Sixties she had found one that suited her, a spacious apartment that in its richness of tone satisfied her. It might have been from the Villa Tittaniitself, by the time Maria had finished its decoration.
“You had worried the maestro to-day,” she said severely, as they approached the heavy bronze and crystal entrance. “He could not even improvise. We are giving our whole hearts and souls to you for your success, and you are not grateful.”
Carlota turned her head and smiled at her tenderly. She was used to the scoldings of the old prima donna.
“I am grateful to you, tanta mia,” she said, slipping her hand under the other’s arm. “But I sometimes think I hate Mr. Ward. When I hear his footstep I cannot sing any more, and when he sits there and looks at me I could jump from the window. I hate his eyes and his voice and everything about him.”
Maria’s dark eyebrows arched in amazement. She glanced with quick suspicion at the girl’s troubled face.
“But you have no reason—have you?”
Carlota’s eyes narrowed with amusement at her anxiety. As they entered the lower hall, she stripped off her long gray suède gloves impatiently. The lights were not switched on yet, and she let one fall near the outer steps. It lay, a part of the twilight, unnoticed by either herself or Maria, but one who came behind thempicked it up. It was a mere fleeting impression she caught of him. Maria had stepped into the elevator when he reached her side to return it, a curious, poster-like figure, with the uncertain light accentuating his foreign features and half-closed, seeking eyes.
“Yes, it is mine, thank you,” she said gravely, and carried with her upstairs an impression of restless, suppressed dissent and discontent combined with a haunting fragrance of a new cigarette smoke. When she reached the apartment, while Maria hurried to make Russian tea for them, she stood by the window, looking down over the boxes of green. Across the street in the mother-of-pearl gloom, she could see the glow of the cigarette where the boy stood, waiting for something, and it held her with almost a premonition of menace.