As they walked up the quiet hill street from the station, Carlota’s dark eyes had sparkled with memories. Surely in this perfect fall day, with the vivid blue of a cloudless sky above the deep crimson and gold of autumn foliage, there was a semblance of the Villa Tittani’s beauty. A rock wall covered with brilliant red creeper vines surrounded the garden. It seemed neglected, with shrubbery straggling in groups, unclipped and straying. The stone flower urns were overgrown with rank, clambering vines. In the southeast corner a dancing faun poised with wary, pointed ears, as if listening seaward. When the Marchese tried to open the outer vestibule door of the enclosed veranda, two stately Italian greyhounds rose leisurely and eyed the callers questioningly.
Within they had found Jacobelli living alone with his memories. Carlota never forgot the picture that he made, welcoming them into his wide, sunlit studio. Swarthy, stout, curly-haired, frowning at her from heavy eyebrows, he had seemed to gauge and grasp her whole capabilities in one swift, cursory glance. She had been caressed and encouraged all of her life, but now, for the first time, she felt her confidence shaken as she waited by the piano, facing the piercing eyes and uncompromising glare of the old maestro. Never once, during the two years of study under him that followed that first visit, had she shaken off that first impression. Eccentric, proud, profoundly conscious of his power to make or unmake queens of the operatic world, he had been a revelation to her from that day.
The Marchese had pleaded for her eloquently, showing the letter he had received from La Paoli a few weeks before her death. Jacobelli had listened to it in silence, staring fixedly at the girl. She was very like her grandmother in appearance, he thought. Behind her stood a towering old terra-cotta jar filled with scarlet autumn leaves. She looked out at the sea view, her eyes filled with a dreaming longing. Her hair was heavy and lustrous, growing back from a low, broad forehead with the shell-like outline one sees in the portraits of Beatrice or one of Del Sarto’s girl saints. Her eyes were long and shadowy, heavy-lidded, aloof. When she was interested or startled, they opened widely, a deep, warm brown color, their darkness made more vivid by the rare rose red of her lips and the peculiar jasmine clearness of her skin. But it was something beyond mere beauty and grace that arrested Jacobelli’s interest. There was a sense of suppressed vitality about her, the insistent promise of the unusual, of some compelling magnetism that lay behind her silence and repression. Suddenly he seated himself at the long bench, and struck a chord for her pitch.
“Sing,” he ordered. “First, a long scale.”
Carlota had hesitated, looking to Maria for sympathy. Might she not sing, for this supreme trial, some famous aria? But Signora Roma had raised both hands in hushed rebuke. They were before the final tribunal. The outcome was on the knees of the gods. But as the full, vibrant soprano rose to the scale, Jacobelli struck a crashing chord and leapt from the bench, clasping his arms about the slim figure at his side.
“Ah, Sanctissima Maria, it is there!” he shouted. “It is the voice of Paoli come to life once more! My beautiful, my marvel, ah, what we will not make of you! Sing, cara mia, sing again for me. No, so!”
For over an hour Carlota sang for him, while Maria sat by the deep bay window, weeping from sheer happiness, and the old Marchese strolled to and fro, stroking the greyhounds, and smoking incessantly, keeping time as he smiled at the success of his experiment.
The fruition of that first visit had come richly in the two years that followed it. Carlota was eighteen now, with not alone the years of her grandmother’s careful teaching, but Jacobelli’s unceasing discipline and watchfulness as her voice ripened and developed. One year more and she would be ready for her début, he said. It was this final year she dreaded, with Ward’s visits to the studio becoming more frequent and his interest in her losing its cloak of patronage.
She was silent on this day, almost during the entire homeward walk across the Park. Their apartment had been Maria’s choice, selected against the better judgment of even the Marchese. He had advised a smaller, less expensive suite farther uptown, but in a conservative section. Maria had cast the suggestion from her scornfully. For the struggling student any environment was of secondary consideration, but for the sole pupil of Guido Jacobelli, the protégée of Ogden Ward, there must be a gilded cage. Between Fifth Avenue and Madison in the upper Sixties she had found one that suited her, a spacious apartment that in its richness of tone satisfied her. It might have been from the Villa Tittani itself, by the time Maria had finished its decoration.
“You had worried the maestro to-day,” she said severely, as they approached the heavy bronze and crystal entrance. “He could not even improvise. We are giving our whole hearts and souls to you for your success, and you are not grateful.”