“Carlota, come back,” he called after her; but the door shut with a slam that sent Ptolemy scurrying for cover, and he stopped short, frowning with a quick, boyish resentment at her suspicion of him. Although there had never been a definite declaration of love between them, yet their whole acquaintance had ripened in an atmosphere of romantic glamour, a piquant, elusive mutual acceptance of each other idealized. He could not have understood the surging resentment in Carlota’s heart as she went uptown to take her real lesson from Jacobelli. Once in the Square she had tossed the jonquils and daffodils broadcast to the children around the fountain. Her mind was a tumult of emotions, of hot rebellion against Ames’s acceptance of her coming as a gift of Fate that was his due. She knew her identity was a mystery to him. He had told her of asking Phelps, and being told she was a protégée of the Marchese Veracci a young Italian singer in whom he was interested; that was all.
He had all of the artist’s selfish point of view, she thought. He had not even caught the personal side of her anger. He saw merely the professional jealousy of one singer towards another in her antagonism towards Nathalie Nevins, and this attitude added fuel to Carlota’s raging indignation against him. He could not even grasp or understand all that the visits had meant to her, all that she had given him gladly. He had not even been musician enough to distinguish between the quality of her voice and that of Nathalie. And suddenly it flashed across her that possibly Jacobelli was right; that she did lack power and dramatic force, feeling, passion, all that made the really great singer.
When she reached the studio she flung the outer door wide even as Maria might have done. Signor Jacobelli was at the piano amusing himself. The taunting, passionate notes of the “Habanera” crashed upon her as she stood a moment transformed utterly from the somber, unawakened girl he had last met. And in an instant she had picked up the melody, provocative, imperative, daring, sauntering into the room with all of Carmen’s tricks at her finger-tips, at her tongue’s end. Jacobelli turned quickly, catching the new note of passion and power. She did not appear even to see him, but flung her whole soul into the song and the underlying tragedy of its motif.
“Brava!” murmured the old maestro, huskily. “Try now the ‘Dance of the Tambourines.’”
As she finished the gypsy song, he sprang from the bench, kissing her hands in ecstasy.
“I do not know, I do not ask from whence this has come to you, but I thank God it is there at last, the divine note for which I have prayed. So you shall sing for Mr. Ward at his dinner, ma bella, and take him by storm.”
Carlota’s eyes glowed with anger as she threw aside her cloak and hat. She looked for the instant like a reincarnation of the youthful Paoli, as he remembered her back at La Scala.
“I will not sing for him or be shown off to him any more,” she told him hotly. “I detest him and all people like him.”
Jacobelli threw back his head, laughing delightedly.
“Aha! Temper?” he cried. “It is the beginning of temperament, thanks be to God. We expect it, my dear, sooner or later. The artistic temperament is like the resistless forces of nature, the storm, the volcano, the tidal wave, the lightning. Life would be tame without them in spite of the danger, would it not? We crave the thrill. Never have I heard the great dramatic quality before in your voice. Ah, you shall sing all the glorious colorful rôles they have had to shelve because there was no one to sing them.”