Carlota had met his appraising eyes with the aloof resentment of an influence that disturbed her.
“Speak, cara mia,” Maria Roma had cried, tears streaming down her plump cheeks, as she clasped her arms enthusiastically around her charge. “Have you no word of thanks?”
And Ward had never forgotten the flash of challenge in the girl’s dark eyes as she had given him her hand.
“I will succeed and pay you back, signor,” she had said. He might have been merely a money-lender to a princess of the de’ Medici.
He had made only one stipulation and that half in jest, though Maria and the Marchese had agreed most earnestly. She was not to marry nor become entangled in love affairs during the period of her tuition. The concession had completely escaped Carlota’s attention. She had wandered by them out into the wide corridor, stifled by the somber silence of the great closed rooms. Not a single fountain falling in the distance, not a living flower anywhere, nothing but age-old treasures in a palatial, modern museum. He had not spoken to her again, only she had heard his last words to Jacobelli.
“May the fruit fulfill the promise. I will come to see you now and then.”
Through the two years of study he had kept his word. Every few months, unawares, he would come to the old studio and sit for a while, listening to Jacobelli and watching his pupil. Even while he never spoke a word of direct intent to her, Carlota felt a vague uneasiness in his presence, under the steady power of his gaze. He carried with him the impression of a compelling, dominant masterfulness, all the more irresistible through its silence and tireless patience. He was in the late thirties at this time, tall and heavy-set, his head, with its thick, close-cut blond hair, thrust forward from a habit of silent intentness. There was the strongest suggestion of the leonine about him. Once, when she was a child, Carlota remembered being taken to see a captive Algerian lion that had just been brought across for the royal zoo. With a city mob surging forward to stare at him, the lion had lain with an imperial languor and indifference, gazing with unblinking eyes beyond the crowd and the city, seeing only the desert that held his whole life’s desire. Sometimes, in the studio, during one of Ward’s visits, she would catch his eyes fixed upon her, while Jacobelli flamed out into some argument or dissertation, and she would shrink from the purpose that lay behind their patience.
To-day the voice of Jacobelli filled the studio, and Carlota’s delicate dark brows contracted sharply as she listened.
“What more can I do? I have given her all that I know of technique and harmony, and still her voice lacks that emotional quality which the greatest alone possess. The divine voice must have dramatic feeling, intensity. It must lose itself in the grandest passion of emotion. The child tries, but what would you? She does not understand the lack in her own nature. Her woman soul yet slumbers.”
Ward glanced at him with amused, quizzical eyes.