VIII
IN a littlepensionon 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 thepensionwithout 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 youknow 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 andtook 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 littlepensionthat night; confident though she was, Miss Carter secretly wiped away a tear, and they both workedlate 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 amoment 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 toofull 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 thegarden 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 shepaid 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 thepensiondisturbed 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 poorconcierge 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.