“I don’t know. But I thought, as she seemed to be fairly intimate with you all——”
“Paula Rawson intimate with us!”
There was a note of indignant protest in her rich voice, and her eyes flashed stormily. Austin metaphorically “sat up,” and Cacciola cast a deprecating glance at the girl.
“I’m sorry if I’ve said anything wrong, Miss Maddelena; but it seems she did come here very frequently, so I naturally thought——”
“Come here, yes, indeed, and far too often,” said Maddelena with emphasis. “But not to see us. She came to see Boris, her cousin; not because she loved him—Paula Rawson was not capable of loving anyone—but because she wanted him as a tool for her ambitions, for her intrigues. She was ruining him, body and soul!”
Cacciola interposed, almost sternly: “Peace, Maddelena. We must speak with charity of the dead!”
“That is my uncle all over. Oh, yes, ‘speak with charity, think with charity!’ For me, I cannot, I will not, when I think of Paula Rawson. I am glad she is dead. If I made any other pretence I should be a hypocrite. This is the truth, Mr. Starr—my uncle knows it, though he will not say so now. We were so happy together, he and I and Boris, a year ago, when I came home from Milan for the winter vacation. You, who have only seen Boris as he is now, cannot imagine what he was then—what he was to us both. And his voice!”
“Ah! she is right,” sighed Cacciola. “It was divine, but the voice is there still, my child, the saints be praised, and when he recovers he will sing once more, better than ever perhaps, and be his old self once again.”
“Perhaps. Because Paula Rawson is dead and can trouble him no more,” cried Maddelena. “He met her, she whom he had thought dead, as would to heaven she had been—and, lo, we became as nothing to him: his voice, his career became as nothing! He lived only for her, to do her bidding, to see her from time to time; plotting for their country, they said. Pouff! He had forgotten his country until he met her—Paula—again, and fluttered round her like a moth round a candle, singeing his wings. Well, that candle has been put out, just in time to save him being burnt up!”
Cacciola shifted uneasily in his chair, but did not venture on further expostulation.