So, one fine afternoon, the little road in which the pretty Bayswater villa was situated was thrown into a state of the greatest excitement by the arrival of the dashing phaeton with the prancing horses in their plated harness; and Mr. Boulderson Munns alighting therefrom, was received by Lord Sandilands, and duly presented to Miss Lambert. After partaking somewhat freely--for he was a convivial soul--of luncheon and dry sherry--which wine he was pleased to compliment highly, asking the "figure" which it cost, and the name of the vendor--the great impresario was ushered into the drawing-room, where Signor Da Capo seated himself at the piano, and Gertrude, without the smallest affectation or hesitation, proceeded to sing. Mr. Munns, who had--been present at many such inaugural attempts, seated himself near Lord Sandilands with a resigned countenance; but after a very few notes the aspect of his face entirely changed; he listened with the greatest attention; he beat time with his little podgy diamond-ringed fingers, and with his varnished boots; and at the conclusion of the song, after a strident cry of "Brava! brava!" he winked calmly at the radiant nobleman, laid his finger alongside his nose, and whispered, "Damme, that'll do!"
After a further hearing the great impresario expressed himself more fully, after his own symbolic fashion.
"That's the right thing," said he; "the right thing, and no flies! or rather it will be the right thing a few months hence.--My dear," he continued, laying his hand on Gertrude's arm, and keeping it there, though she shrank from his touch, "no offence, my dear; you've got the right stuff in you! No doubt of that! Now what we've got to do is to bring it out of you. Don't you make any mistake about it; it's there, but it wants forcing. What's to force it? why, a mellower air a and few lessons reg'larly given by someone who knows all about it. No offence again to Da Capo here, who's a very good fellow--him and me understand each other; but this young lady wants someone bigger than him, and quiet and rest and freedom from London ways and manners. Let her go to Italy and stop there for nine months; meanwhile you and me, my lord, the Marsh'ness Carabas, and the rest of us, will work the oracle, and then she shall came back and come out at the Grand Scandinavian Opera House; and if she ain't a success, I'll swallow my Lincoln and Bennett!"
There was a pause for a minute, and then Lord Sandilands said: "Do you mean that Miss Lambert should make her début on the Italian stage?"
"Not a bit of it," shrieked Mr. Munns; "keep her début for here! A gal like that, who can walk up to the piano and sing away before me, won't have any stage-fright, I'll pound it! Let her go to Florence, to old Papadaggi--which you know him well, my lord, and can make it all square there; let her take lessons of him, and make her début with me. I'm a man of my word, as you know, and I see my way."
Within a fortnight from that time Miles Challoner, who had been out of town, called at the Bayswater villa, found it in charge of a policeman and his wife, learned that Miss Lambert and Mrs. Bloxam had gone to Hit'ly for some months, and--went away lamenting.
[CHAPTER IX.]
Soaring.
The novelty of her life in Italy was full of charm for Gertrude. She was still so young that she could escape, in any momentary emotion of pleasure, from the hardening influence of the past, and the entire change of scene had almost an intoxicating effect upon her. Here was no association with anything in the past which could pain, or in the present which might have the power to disconcert her. Her husband's foot had never trodden the paths in which she wandered daily, with all the pleasure of a stranger and all the appreciation of natural beauty which formed a portion of her artistic temperament. He had never gazed upon the classic waters of the Arno, or roamed through the picture-galleries which afforded her such intense delight, and would have been almost without a charm for his cynical materialistic nature. At least, if he had ever visited Italy, Gertrude did not know it; and with all her very real indifference, despite the wonderfully thorough enfranchisement of her mind and heart from the trammels of her dead-and-gone relation to him, Gertrude, with true womanly inconsistency, still occasionally associated him sufficiently with her present life to feel that distance from Gilbert Lloyd, that the strangeness of the unfamiliar places with which he was wholly unassociated, added to the reality of her sense of freedom, gave it zest and flavour. She understood this inconsistency. "If I go on like this," she would think, "it will never do. I am much too near hating him at present to be comfortable. So long as he is not absolutely nothing to me I am not quite free; so long as I prefer the sense of the impossibility of my seeing him by any accident--so long as I am more glad to know that he is staying with Lord Ticehurst, and Lord Ticehurst's reputable friends, than I should be to know that he was in the next house on the promenade--so long as either circumstance has the smallest appreciable interest or importance for me--I am not free. I must regard him as so utterly nothing, that if I were to meet him to-morrow at the Cascine, or passing my door, it could have no importance, no meaning for me. I don't mean only in the external sense, of not appearing to agitate or concern me, but in the interior convictions of my own inmost heart. Such freedom I am quite resolved to have. It will come, I am sure, but not just yet. I am far too near to hating him yet."
Gertrude had unusual power in the distribution of the subjects on which she chose to exercise her thinking faculty, and in the absolute and sustained expulsion from her mind of such topics as she chose to discard. This faculty was useful to her now. There were certain phases and incidents of her life with Gilbert Lloyd which she never thought about. She deliberately put them out of her mind, and kept them out of it. Among these were the occurrences which had immediately preceded the strange bargain which had been made between her and her husband. Of that bargain herself she thought with ever-growing satisfaction, remembering with complacent content the obscurity in which she had lived, which rendered such an arrangement possible, without risk of detection. But she never travelled farther back in memory than the making of that bargain. So then she determined to carry it out to the fullest, to have all the satisfaction out of it she possibly could. "I am determined I will bring myself to such freedom that the sight of him could not give me even an unpleasant sensation--that the sound of his name announced in the room with me should have no more meaning for me than any other sound devoid of interest."