The fatal three, vol. III

A WRECKED LIFE.

Monsieur Leroy was 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 comes a 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 the stage—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 she stopped 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 any one; 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 to him, 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 my salon it must be to sing, not to reopen old sores. We all have our wounds as well 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 a suffering 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 had saved no money. She had been reckless even beyond the habits of her profession. She was friendless. There was nobody interested in her fate—”