He was alarmed at her evident intention to go back to the stage, couldn’t believe it, wanted me to tell him why an abandoned resolution should come back like a curse to roost. He couldn’t get away from his original conception of her, had learned her one way and couldn’t relearn her another. It was at once a pathetic sight and an illuminating experience—the man of ability, the student, the scholar, out of his depths and floundering foolishly. The mind trained to the recognition of the obvious and established, accustomed to fit its own standards to any and all forms of the human animal, coming up with a dizzying impact against the mind that had no guide, no standard, no code, but floats in the flux of its own emotions.
I repeat I was sorry, immensely sorry. Such is the inconsistency of human nature that I was filled up and overflowing with sympathy at the spectacle of my own man, once my exclusive property, hurt, flouted and outraged by the vagaries of my successful rival.
A eight o’clock that evening I was in my sitting-room when I heard her come in. She did not stop at my door but went up-stairs, a quick rustling progress through the silence of the house. It was very still, not a sound from any of the rooms, when I heard the notes of her piano, and then her voice—“Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix.” The register was shut, and I stole to the door and opening it stood at the stair-head listening. Before the aria was over I knew that what she had said was true. Lizzie had found herself.
After a pause she began again—O Patria Mia from Aïda. I tiptoed forward and let myself noiselessly down on the top step, breath held to listen. As the song swelled, the cry of a bleeding and distracted heart, the doors along the passages were softly opened. Up and down the wall came the click of turned latches and stealthy footsteps. Mrs. Bushey’s lodgers were not abroad, as I had thought. The stairs creaked gently as they dropped upon them. When Patria Mia was over we were all there. I could see the legs of Mr. Hamilton and the count dangling over the banisters above me. On the bottom of the flight Mr. Weatherby sat, and Miss Bliss and Mr. Hazard leaned against the wall, looking up with the gaslight gilding their faces.
In the silence that fell on the last note no one spoke. There was no rising chorus of praise as there once had been. I don’t think we were aware of one another, each rapt in the memory of an ecstatic sadness. The cautious foot of Mrs. Phillips stealing along the lower hall made me look down and I saw her stationing herself beside young Hazard, and that Dolly Bliss’ face shone with tears.
She went on—Vissi d’Arte, Vissi d’Amore, Musetta’s song; the habanera from Carmen, Brahm’s Sapphische Ode, sounding the depths and heights. Between each piece we were dumb, only the creaking of the banisters as Mr. Hamilton shifted, or the sniffing of Miss Bliss when the song was sad, fell on our silence. We never saw her. She was at last the diva, remote, august, a woman mysterious and unknown, singing to us across an impassable gulf.
As long as I live I shall never forget it—the narrow half-lit passages, the long oval of the stair-well, on the bottom step of my flight Mr. Weatherby’s back, broad and bent, as he rested his elbows on his knees. Against the whitewashed wall below Mr. Hazard with his eyes fixed in a trance of listening; Mrs. Phillips, her head pressed back against the wall, her lids closed, and Dolly Bliss’ little face bright with slow dropping tears.
We were Liza Bonaventura’s first audience.
XIX
The next morning, while I yet slept, she came knocking and rattling at my door. When I let her in she upbraided me for having it locked, unmindful of my sleepy excuses that as the street door was generally open all night it was wisdom to keep one’s apartment firmly closed.