CHAPTER XI
Signor Jacobelli was in a baffled mood. Every time Carlota came for her lesson, he would regard her thoughtfully, dubiously, but found no solution to his problem in her happy, serene face and dark eyes that held a gleam of mirth nowadays.
Once she had just missed meeting Ward himself there. It had been his first visit since the dinner, and after his departure a florist’s messenger brought her a purple box filled with single-petaled Parma violets. Under them lay a velvet case containing a pendant, two perfect, pear-shaped pearls. She retained the messenger, writing on the back of Ward’s own card in haste:
Signor: I thank you. The only jewels I ever wear are those of my grandmother!
Carlota Trelango.
“And the flowers—behold!” she flung up a window and leaned far out to throw them down into the street. A street piano played below, the wife of the owner turning the crank with a stout bambino on one hip. “You throw her some money now, maestro, so that both soul and body are fed. Who was it said, bread for the body, white hyacinths—” She checked herself, recalling suddenly that it had been Dmitri who loved to chant Mahomet’s axiom, but Jacobelli had not even noticed it. Grumblingly he dropped a crumpled bill to the woman’s extended apron.
“You are not a spoiled child any longer,” he told Carlota. “You are now a person of destiny. Why, then, do you persist in acting like a petulant marionette instead of the dignified artiste. You cannot afford to rebuff Ward. He is your patron. You are merely a little beggar on the doorstep of hope, my child, and you take on the airs of a queen.”
“And here you have been telling me all along that I must learn to be queenlike and aloof.” Carlota sat back in the winged armchair beside the fireplace. It was far too deep and too high for her, having been selected solely to accommodate the rotund proportions of Jacobelli, but she preferred it. Some way, it had the significance of a throne chair when she felt herself holding the balance of power, as now. “And if I am a person of destiny, then how can anything that I do alter events?” She laughed up at him softly, teasingly. He looked away from her in somber disapproval. “Oh, my dear, dear good teacher and friend,” she pleaded with swift reaction. “Forgive me. I will try, indeed I will. What do you want me to do? Anything but see Mr. Ward alone.”
“You shall prepare for your début.” Jacobelli took up her challenge instantly. “Casanova will place you on the list for next season. That will give you an entire year for more study. And you shall flame forth in glory as Margherita or Gilda—”
“Why not Santuzza or Aïda?” Carlota’s temper rose at his suggestion. “Let me sing these, my maestro, when I am stout and placid some day, but now, give me the new rôles.”