Rosa was at her wit’s end, but Signor Vasari’s patience was worn to its last thread, and her father was utterly impracticable. Violante ceased to complain, but her soft, tender eyes had a desperate look, and her sweet confiding ways had grown solitary and strange. What would be the end of it?
It hardly caused Rosa surprise when, one night, in the midst of a performance, Violante fainted. The representation was brought to an abrupt conclusion, and Mademoiselle Mattei declared to be too ill to appear again. The public of Civita Bella was sorry; somehow the soft, lovely girl had gained a hold on their affections; but through the days while she lay ill and unconscious there was much wrangling between her father and the manager as to the amount of her salary to be forfeited by her non-fulfilment of her engagement. All talk of any tenderer relation had been dropped, and the discussion was settled greatly to Signor Mattei’s dissatisfaction. He felt that he had been ill-treated. Violante’s further gains were gone for that season; his own hung on a thread; some of Rosa’s best pupils, like Emily Tollemache, had left the place. What was to become of them?
As he came in, with his head full of all these various annoyances, he encountered Rosa standing in the sitting-room, holding in her hand the soft, dusky lengths of Violante’s hair.
“You have not cut off her hair?” he exclaimed, wrathfully.
“It may save her life,” said Rosa, whose eyes were red with crying. “She—she may not die.”
Then Signor Mattei, realising for the first time that his child’s life was in danger, burst out with vehement lamentations.
She had been his hope and his pride, spite of all her wilfulness—should he never hear her angel’s voice again?—and he seized on the long, soft hair, and kissed it and cried over it.
“It is the singing that has killed her,” said Rosa, bitterly. “If you had listened to her entreaties—” she checked herself, feeling the reproach to be cruel and undutiful; but, with a certain hard common-sense, developed by a life in which she had seen many illusions fade, revolting against the sentiment, coming, as it seemed, too late.
“No!” cried Signor Mattei. “It is not the singing. It is that young Englishman for whom she has pined away. And you—you permitted her to know and to see him, and encouraged her in her folly!”
“This is no time for quarrelling, father,” said Rosa, as she turned away, and went back to her sister, feeling as if, with Violante, every ray of sunshine would fade out of her life.