Carlota had turned from him and gone to the west windows, the tears blinding her sight. Even the agony of one’s heart, then, had a commercial value. Life was merely the arena where one gave all for applause, where human emotions merely added to the thrill of suspense. The deeper the reality of the knife-thrust, the cleverer the counterfeit acting.
“I hate it all,” she sobbed brokenly. “I wish we could go back to Tittani. Tell them my voice is hopeless, maestro, and let me go.”
Jacobelli lit a cigarette deliberately, eyeing her thoughtfully. He tipped a chair backwards and seated himself, rocking slowly on two of its legs.
“Who is he?” he asked gently.
Carlota looked back at him in angry silence, startled into caution at his words, but he waved one plump hand at her airily and reassuringly.
“Remember, my child, I have known both your mother and grandmother. History moves in recurrent cycles, even the history of human hearts, and particularly when we consider heredity. I talked with Margherita Paoli when first she took Bianca from the convent. She told me her theory of life for a woman of genius and I agreed with her perfectly. Love in its perfection is the supreme sacrifice of self, art is the elevation of self, the crowning of self. They are at war eternally. So I told her, and she said she would keep Bianca safe behind the wall of Tittani while she studied. Never should the danger of love approach her until her success was assured, and this creed was impressed upon your mother, my dear, with what result? Even while we two fools prated, she was listening in the garden to the boy Peppino and was gone before her mother even guessed their love.”
Carlota turned back into the room suddenly, her eyes brilliant with eager appeal.
“Tell me who John Tennant was?” she asked him. “Why did my nurse use to tell me that no woman could escape over the wall of Tittani without meeting the tragic fate of the Princess Fiametta? Oh, you are all so blind! You treat me like a baby, and never think I hear or see anything. Don’t you suppose I ever think or reason? I used to go down to the end of the garden looking seaward, to that little stone house where they told me he had lived and died. Once I went in when I found the door unlocked. Everything was just as he had left it, and while I was wondering what it all meant, my grandmother came in from the little walk along the terrace above and I knew she had been weeping. Then Maria told me only his name. Who was he?”
Jacobelli made a magnificent gesture.
“I may not tell you. The secret of his being there was only known to his friend Wallace, the Marchese, and myself. I found out by accident when I sought her and implored her to return to the stage. She loved him, and he never even knew that she was near him in the garden or that it was her love and bounty he lived upon. Ah, the wonderful woman she was! Only as he died, unconscious in her arms, could she speak to him or caress him, and he never knew. Think of her pride, imperial in its abnegation.”