“Ward is becoming very much interested in her. She treats him with indifference. You must teach her diplomacy. She has too much arrogance of youth, and absolutely no gratitude for what he is doing for her.”
Maria’s brilliant dark eyes narrowed with comprehensive amusement.
“You ask the impossible, Guido. I who have known all three, Margherita, Bianca, and this glorious child, tell you the truth, and you will remember what I say. You can no more teach the heart of a Paoli to keep its temperament within bounds than you can yoke the thunder-clouds and lightning that sweep down over our Trentino.”
“And the responsibility is ours,” said Jacobelli, with a deep exhalation of his cigarette. “Given this nature, we are to keep her a prisoner behind the wall of Tittani, eh?”
Maria sank deeply into the velvet-cushioned chair beside him, and the two smiled at each other reminiscently.
“It was a high wall,” she sighed at length. “I remember your last visit there, Guido, before the child was born, five years I think it was. Bianca was a flower then. Such flaming hair and dark eyes, the true Florentine type. She was more like Tittani in her looks. Carlota is a throwback to the grandmother. Ah, my Guido, was there ever a woman like her? Even at the last, before he died, when her heart was torn with agony of renunciation—”
“She lost her voice,” Jacobelli spoke with finality. “Yet Ward would tell me love is the great fulfillment. Did she ever sing again? No. She buried her art with her love in the grave of her poet after he had denied her to the world. You and I, Maria Roma, who know of this, must protect this child against the traitor in her own nature.”
Maria sighed doubtfully. She was the large, vivid type of the Italian peasant, richly developed by success and circumstance. Years before, Sforza, director of La Scala, had journeyed with friends to a mountain section of the Trentino. In the purple twilight a voice had drifted down to them from a band of vintage workers, homeward bound. It was Maria Roma at eighteen, a buoyant, deep-breasted bacchante, her black hair hanging in thick clusters of curls around her radiant face.
Enrico Sforza had loved her, more perhaps for her ardent faithfulness and responsiveness. She had achieved a sensation in contralto rôles and he had interested La Paoli in his peasant love. In middle age, after his death, Maria had retired to live at the Villa Tittani with the old diva. Here she had shared with her in the tragedy of her final years. Fifty years before, the story of Margherita Paoli and her love for John Tennant, the English poet, had been part of the romance of Italy. Her beauty and genius had opened every door of success to her. Even on the threshold of womanhood she had been given all that ambition could demand from life, and turning in the highest hour of her triumphs, she had forsaken the world for a year, giving the full gift of her love to Tennant.
Suddenly she had returned, restless and hungering for her art. As Maria knew, Tennant had been jealous of her voice and the life which he could not share, had demanded that she give up her career for the sake of their love, and return with him to England. And she had laughed at him. Love could not bring full completeness and happiness to a woman of genius, she had said. It could not satisfy her for the loss of the divine fire. Tennant had left Italy, and five years later she married Count Tittani. Bianca, the mother of Carlota, had been born at the old villa overlooking the Campagna. She had spent her childhood here, and in the convent of Maria Pietà at the head of the ancient ilex avenue leading up from Mondragone. Tittani had died when she was nine, leaving La Paoli the prestige of his name and wealth combined with her own full measure of maturity in her art.