BOOK THE THIRD.ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.
BOOK THE THIRD.
ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.
CHAPTER I.A WRECKED LIFE.
Monsieur Leroywas interested in his visitor, and in nowise hastened her departure. He led her through the garden of the asylum, anxious that she should see that sad life of the shattered mind in its milder aspect. The quieter patients were allowed to amuse themselves at liberty in the garden, and here Mildred saw the woman who fancied herself the Blessed Virgin, and who sat apart from the rest, with a crown of withered anemones upon her iron-gray locks.
The doctor stopped to talk to her in the Niçois language, describing her hallucination to Mildred in his broken English between whiles.
“She is one of my oldest cases, and mild as a lamb,” he said. “She is what superstition had made her. She might have been a happy wife as a mother but for that fatal influence. Ah, here comesa lady of a very different temper, and not half so easy a subject!”
A woman of about sixty advanced towards them along the dusty gravel path between the trampled grass and the dust-whitened orange-trees, a woman who carried her head and shoulders with the pride of an empress, and who looked about her with defiant eyes, fanning herself with a large Japanese paper fan as she came along, a fan of vivid scarlet and cheap gilt paper, which seemed to intensify the brightness of her great black eyes, as she waved it to and fro before her haggard face: a woman who must once have been beautiful.
“Would you believe that lady was prima donna at La Scala nearly forty years ago?” asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood beside the path, watching that strange figure, with its theatrical dignity.
The massive plaits of grizzled black hair were wound, coronet-wise, about the woman’s head. Her rusty black velvet gown trailed in the dust, threadbare long ago, almost in tatters to-day: a gown of a strange fashion, which had been worn upon thestage—Leonora’s or Lucrezia’s gown, perhaps, once upon a time.
At sight of the physician she stopped suddenly, and made him a sweeping curtsy, with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre.
“Do you know if they open this month at the Scala?” she asked, in Italian.
“Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing of their doings.”
“They might have begun their season with the new year,” she said, with a dictatorial air. “They always did in my time. Of course you know that they have tried to engage me again. They wanted me for Amina, but I had to remind them that I am not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my own ground. No one can touch me there.”
She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s first scena. The once glorious voice was rough and discordant, but there was power in the tones even yet, and real dramatic fire in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly while she was singing she caught the expression of Mildred’s face watching her, and shestopped at a breath, and grasped the stranger by both hands with an excited air.
“That moves you, does it not?” she exclaimed. “You have a soul for music. I can see that in your face. I should like to know more of you. Come and see me whenever you like, and I will sing to you. The doctor lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is in a good humour.”
“Say rather when you are reasonable, my good Maria,” said Monsieur Leroy, laying a fatherly hand upon her shoulder; “there are days when you are not to be trusted.”
“I am to be trusted to-day. Let me come to your room and sing to her,” pointing to Mildred with her fan. “I like her face. She has the eyes and lips that console. Her husband is lucky to have such a wife. Let me sing to her. I want her to understand what kind of woman I am.”
“Would it bore you too much to indulge her, madame?” asked the doctor in an undertone. “She is a strange creature, and it will wound her if you refuse. She does not often take a fancy to anyone; but she frequently takes dislikes, and those are violent.”
“I shall be very happy to hear her,” answered Mildred. “I am in no hurry to return to Nice.”
The doctor led the way back to his house, the singer talking to Mildred with an excited air as they went, talking of the day when she was first soprano at Milan.
“Everybody envied me my success,” she said. “There were those who said I owed everything tohim, that he made my voice and my style. Lies, madame, black and bitter lies. I won all the prizes at the Conservatoire. He was one master among many. I owed him nothing—nothing—nothing!”
She reiterated the word with acrid emphasis, and an angry furl of her fan.
“Ah, now you are beginning the old strain!” said the doctor, with a good-humoured shrug of his shoulders. “If this goes on there shall be no piano for you to-day. I will have no grievances; grievances are the bane of social intercourse. If you come to mysalonit must be to sing, not to reopen old sores. We all have our wounds aswell as you, signorina, but we keep them covered up.”
“I am dumb,” said the singer meekly.
They went into the doctor’s private sitting-room. Three sides of the room were lined with books, chiefly of a professional or scientific character. A cottage piano stood in a recess by the fireplace. The woman flew to the instrument with a rapturous eagerness, and began to play. Her hands were faintly tremulous with excitement, but her touch was that of a master as she played the symphony to the finale of “La Cenerentola.”
“Has she no piano in her own room?” asked Mildred in a whisper.
“No, poor soul. She is one of our pauper patients. The State provides for her, but it does not give her a private room or a piano. I let her come here two or three times a week for an hour or so, when she is reasonable.”
Mildred wondered if it would be possible for her, as a stranger, to provide a room and a piano for this friendless enthusiast. She would have been glad out of her abundance to have lightened asuffering sister’s fate, and she determined to make the proposition to the doctor.
The singer played snatches of familiar music—Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini—operatic airs which Mildred knew by heart. She wandered from one scena to another, and her voice, though it had lost its sweetness and sustaining power, was still brilliantly flexible. She sang with a rapturous unconsciousness of her audience, Mildred and the doctor sitting quietly at each side of the hearth, where a single pine log smouldered on the iron dogs above a heap of white ashes.
Presently the music changed to a gayer, lighter strain, and she began an airy cavatina, all coquetry and grace. That joyous melody was curiously familiar to Mildred’s ear.
“Where did I hear that music?” she said aloud. “It seems as if it were only the other day, and yet it is nearly two years since I was at the opera.”
The singer left the cavatina unfinished, and wandered into another melody.
“Ah, I know now!” exclaimed Mildred; “that is Paolo Castellani’s music!”
The woman started up from the piano as if the name had wounded her.
“Paolo Castellani!” she cried. “What do you know of Paolo Castellani?”
Dr. Leroy went over to her, and laid his hand upon her shoulder heavily.
“Now we are in for a scene,” he muttered to Mildred. “You have mentioned a most unlucky name.”
“What has she to do with Signor Castellani?”
“He was her cousin. He trained her for the stage, and she was the original in several of his operas. She was his slave, his creature, and lived only to please him. I suppose she expected him to marry her, poor soul; but he knew better than that. He contrived to fascinate a French girl, a consumptive, who was travelling in Italy for her health, with a wealthy father. He married the Frenchwoman; and I believe that marriage broke Maria’s heart.”
The singer had seated herself at the piano again, and was playing with rapid and brilliant finger, running up and down the keys in wild excitement.Mildred and the physician were standing by the window, talking in lowered voices, unheeded by Maria Castellani.
“Was it that event which wrecked her mind?” asked Mildred, deeply interested.
“No, it was some years afterwards that her brain gave way. She had a brilliant career before her at the time of Castellani’s desertion; and she bore the blow with the courage of a Roman. So long as her voice lasted, and the public were constant to her, she contrived to bear up against that burning sense of wrong which has been the distinguishing note of her mind ever since she came here. But the first breath of failure froze her. She felt her voice decaying while she was comparatively a young woman. Her glass told her that she was losing her beauty, that she was beginning to look old and haggard. Her managers told her more. They gave her the cold shoulder, and put newer singers above her head. Then despair took hold of her; she became gloomy and irritable, difficult and capricious in her dealings with her fellow-artists; and then came the end, and she was brought here. She hadsaved no money. She had been reckless even beyond the habits of her profession. She was friendless. There was nobody interested in her fate—”
“Not even Signor Castellani?”
“Castellani—Paolo Castellani?Pas si bête.The man was a compound of selfishness and treachery. She was not likely to get pity from him. The very fact that he had used her badly made her loathsome to him. I doubt if he ever inquired what became of her. If any one had asked him about her, he would have said that she had dropped through—a worn-out voice, a faded beauty—que voulez-vous?”
“She had no other friends—no ties?”
“None. She was an orphan at twelve years old, without a son. Castellani paid for her education, and traded upon her talent. He trained her to sing in his own operas, and in that light, fanciful music she was at her best; though it is her delusion now that she excelled in the grand style. I believe he absorbed the greater part of her earnings, until they quarrelled. Some time after his marriage there was a kind of reconciliation between them.She appeared in a new opera—his last and worst. Her voice was going, his talent had began to fail. It was the beginning of the end.”
“Has Signor Castellani’s son shown no interest in this poor creature’s fate?”
“No; the son lives in England, I believe, for the most part. I doubt if he knows anything about Maria.”
The singer had reverted to that familiar music. She sang the first part of an aria, a melody disguised with over-much fioritura, light, graceful, unmeaning.
“That is in his last opera,” she said, rising from the piano, with a more rational air. “The opera was almost a failure; but I was applauded to the echo. His genius had forsaken him. Follies, follies, falsehoods, crimes. He could not be true to any one or anything. He was as false to his wife as he had been false to me, and to his proud young English signorina; ah, well! who can doubt that he lied toher?”
She fell into a meditative mood, standing by the piano, touching a note now and then.
“Young and handsome and rich. Would she have accepted degradation with open eyes? No, no, no. He lied to her as he had lied to me. He was made up of lies.”
Her eyes grew troubled, and her lips worked convulsively. Again the doctor laid his strong broad hand upon her shoulder.
“Come, Maria,” he said in Italian; “enough for to-day. Madame has been pleased with your singing.”
“Yes, indeed, signora. You have a noble voice. I should be very glad if I could do anything to be of use to you; if I could contribute to your comfort in any way.”
“O, Maria is happy enough with us, I hope,” said the doctor cheerily. “We are all fond of her when she is reasonable. But it is time she went to her dinner.A rivederci, signora.”
Maria accepted her dismissal with a good grace, saluted Mildred and the doctor with her stage curtsy, and withdrew. One side of Monsieur Leroy’s house opened into the garden, the other into a courtyard adjoining the high-road.
“Poor soul! I should be so glad to pay for a piano and a private sitting-room for her, if I might be allowed to do so,” said Mildred, when the singer was gone.
“You are too generous, madame; but I doubt if it would be good for her to accept your bounty. She enjoys the occasional use of my piano intensely. If she had one always at her command, she would give up her life to music, which exercises too strong an influence upon her disordered brain to be indulged inad libitum. Nor would a private apartment be an advantage in her case. She is too much given to brooding over past griefs; and the society of her fellow-sufferers, the friction and movement of the public life, are good for her.”
“What did she mean by her talk of an English girl—some story of wrong-doing? Was it all imaginary?”
“I believe there was some scandal at Milan; some flirtation, or possibly an intrigue, between Castellani and one of his English pupils; but I never heard the details. Maria’s jealousy would be likely to exaggerate the circumstances; for I believeshe adored her cousin to the last, long after she knew that he had never cared for her, except as an element in his success.”
Mildred took leave of the doctor, after thanking him for his politeness. She left a handful of gold for the benefit of the poor patients, and left Dr. Leroy under the impression that she was one of the sweetest women he had ever met. Her pensive beauty, her low and musical voice, the clear and resolute purpose of every word and look, were in his mind indications of the perfection of womanhood.
“It is not often that Nature achieves such excellence,” mused the doctor. “It is a pity that perfection should be short-lived; yet I cannot prognosticate length of years for this lady.”
Pamela’s spirits were decidedly improving. She talked all dinner-time, and gave a graphic description of her afternoon in the tennis-court behind the Cercle de la Méditerranée.
“I am to see the club-house some morning before the members begin to arrive,” she said. “It is a perfectly charming club. There is a theatre,which serves as a ballroom on grand occasions. There is to be a dance next week; and Lady Lochinvar will chaperon me, if you don’t mind.”
“I shall be most grateful to Lady Lochinvar, dear. Believe me, if I am a hermit, I don’t want to keep you in melancholy seclusion. I am very glad for you to have pleasant friends.”
“Mrs. Murray is delightful. She begged me to call her Jessie. She is going to take me for a drive before lunch to-morrow, and we are to do some shopping in the afternoon. The shops here are simply lovely.”
“Almost as nice as Brighton?”
“Better. They have morechic; and I am told they are twice as dear.”
“Was Mr. Stuart at the tennis-court?”
“Yes, he plays there every afternoon when he is not at Monte Carlo.”
“That does not sound like a very useful existence.”
“Perhaps you will sayheis an adventurer,” exclaimed Pamela, with a flash of temper; and then repenting in a moment, she added: “I beg yourpardon, aunt; but you are really wrong about Mr. Stuart. He looks after Lady Lochinvar’s estate. He is invaluable to her.”
“But he cannot do much for the estate when he is playing tennis here or gambling at Monte Carlo.”
“O, but he does. He answers no end of letters every morning. Lady Lochinvar says he is a most wonderful young man. He attends to her house accounts here. I am afraid she would be very extravagant if she were not well looked after. She has no idea of business. Mr. Stuart has even to manage her dressmakers.”
“Then one may suppose he is really useful—even at Nice. Has he any means of his own, or is he entirely dependent on his aunt?”
“O, he has an income of his own—a modest income, Mrs. Murray says, hardly enough for him to get along easily in a cavalry regiment, but quite enough for him as a civilian; and his aunt will leave him everything. His expectations are splendid.”
“Well, Pamela, I will not callhiman adventurer,and I shall be pleased to make his acquaintance, if he will call upon me.”
“He is dying to know you. May Mrs. Murray bring him to tea to-morrow afternoon?”
“With pleasure.”