Part 4, Chapter XXVIII.
Signor Arthur.
“The sound of a voice that was still.”
Madame Cellini was not likely to be shy of making a new acquaintance, nor were her young companions accustomed to the profound seclusion in which Italian girls are usually trained. Rosa would have accepted an intimacy with a compatriot readily enough, and even Violante was used to a certain amount of intercourse with her father’s friends. Here at Caletto Madame Cellini had a few intimates, and when Arthur Spencer lingered on there she discovered that French formed a possible medium of communication, and took a great fancy to the pleasant-mannered young Englishman.
“Folly, Rosina!” she said, as Rosa ventured a remonstrance. “I read your fears. You think the Signor Inglese at the late looked too often above his music at our Violantina. Never fear! So will many another. And as for Signor Pinchere, talk to him yourself, Rosina!”
And the old lady gave an indescribably mischievous smile, and then laughed broadly. Rosa was angry, but she did not choose to enlighten Madame Cellini any further as to the real state of the case; and, unable to prevent the intercourse by Italian restrictions, nor to justify it by the more English manner of ignoring the possibility of a chance acquaintance signifying to anyone, she was obliged to leave it in the neutral ground of “being Madame Cellini’s way.”
She need not have alarmed herself. Arthur knew that it was all very amusing, and accepted it as an incident in his travels; but would not have cared if anything had turned his steps in another direction. Nothing, however, did turn them; so he tried to distract his thoughts by Madame Cellini’s wonderful stories, and to interest himself in her confidences about the young cantatrice whose career had been so suddenly checked. He had given the nearest town as an address where letters might find him, and having written to Hugh before his arrival he expected an answer. Somehow, Arthur’s thoughts turned to Hugh with a sort of fellow-feeling. He, too, was suffering; and perhaps would not only pity him, but would understand how no change of scene did him any good. If Hugh had but known! but he only thought that Arthur was well spared the sight of him.
Arthur, however, congratulated himself on having obtained some materials for a letter to Jem, a little less like a guide-book than his ordinary correspondence, describing old Madame Cellini, and telling the wrong end of Violante’s history. “She was to have made a great sensation, and married the manager, and the poor child lost her lover and her voice at once. So she looks sad and pathetic; and isn’t it a miserable little story for the sunny south? You write too anxiously about me. I am very well, and make a fair fight for it. If that poor little girl can hold up her head after such a storm, one ought to have better courage.”
Violante was as unconscious of the garbled form in which her story had reached the English stranger’s ears, and of the reflections which he drew therefrom for his own benefit, as she was of the connection of Signor Arthur—or Arturo, as he had taught Madame Cellini to call him, finding her conceptions of his surname beyond correction—with the chief actor in it. But she felt drawn towards him, and ceased to be shy of one so kindly in manner, while a sort of instinct of fellow-feeling made her say, after a few days, to Rosa: “She was sure Signor Arthur was unhappy, and she wondered why.”