Well, after that it was all the same thing. Exercise, practice, performance, success; then sleep, and exercise again, da capo.
She was a prima donna now, our little Margarita, a successful artist, a public character. "Margarita Josépha," Madame had christened her, for twenty years ago simple American surnames found no favour with the impressario, and "cette charmante Mme. Josépha," "artiste vraiment ravissante," etc., etc., the critics called her.
As Juliet she looked her loveliest, as Marguerite she acted her best, as Aïda she sang most wonderfully. Indeed it was this last that captured London and gave rise to the much exaggerated affair of the Certain Royal Personage. She sang Aïda twelve times in one season (going to London from Paris) and the boys whistled the airs through the streets and the bands played from it whenever she rode in the Park. I myself saw the diamond bracelet Miss Jencks returned to the Duke of S—— (we did not tell Roger, by mutual consent, till much later) and the Queen's pearl-set brooch when she sang at Windsor marked at least one satisfying unanimity among members of the royal family.
I took Mary, long afterward, to hear Mme. G——i in the part Margarita made famous in London, and when the tears rolled down the child's face as poor Aïda (that barbaric romanesque) dies in melody, portly though starving, and unconvincingly pale, I wished she might have seen her mother. There was a death! Nothing in Aïda's life could possibly have become her like Margarita's leaving of it, I am sure.
Roger ceased to go after the first performances, and indeed he was very busy, and crossed the ocean more than once in the American interests of his French and English clientèle. But whoever stopped at home or went, whoever applauded or yawned, whoever approved of the present status of the Bradley family or disapproved, one gaunt figure never left Margarita's side from the moment she left her door till she returned to it (except for the inevitable separations of the actual stage-scene, and I think she regretted the necessity for these!) This figure was Barbara Jencks's, and hers were the cool, uncompromising eyes into which the enraptured devotee gazed when he followed his card into the drawing-room, hers the strong and knuckly hands that put his flowers into water and his more valuable expressions of regard back into their velvet cases, previous to re-addressing them. She drove with Margarita, when Sue Paynter did not, and would have ridden with her, I verily believe, had not Carter and I volunteered to supply that deficiency.
It was she who received that astonished and, I fear, disappointed kiss from the German officer at Brussels, when the students drew Margarita's carriage home from the opera house after her astonishing triumph in the last act of Siegfried. It was an absurd part for her—she had never done Elsa nor Elizabeth, and Mme. M——i was very angry with her. Herr M——l, the great director, spent the summer in Italy and Switzerland and was with our party nearly all of the time. Purely to please himself he taught Margarita the rôle of Brünhilde in Siegfried and insisted on her singing it that winter in Brussels under him. It was wonderful, and showed me what her real forte was to be. She was Brünhilde, she did not need to act it. How the Master himself would have revelled in her!
She was very teachable—one of the most certain indications of her great capacities. Her Marguerite was almost entirely her own, for she had not learned how to use dramatic instruction; her Aïda was almost Madame's own, for she had learned, then, and besides, did not understand the character; her Brünhilde was herself, trained and assisted into the best canons of interpretation by a loyal Wagnerian. It is a short part, of course, but it showed what she could have done with the rest of it. At thirty-five she could have done the whole Ring; at forty I believe no one could have equalled her.
Carter got himself snarled hopelessly into a tangle with the government officials in Berlin (he was no diplomat, though a good fellow, and wild about Margarita, so that poor little Alice had more than one bad quarter-hour, I'm afraid) and it took Roger a great deal of Bradley influence with the American consul and a lot of patient correspondence to unravel his unlucky brother-in-law. This gave Roger a good excuse for being in and near Germany; whether he would have stayed without it, I don't know.
The work on Napoleon was done: he had laboured over it in Rome during the summer, and Margarita had been very sweet, refusing more than one invitation (at Sue Paynter's earnest request) to stay with him. But it was only too evident that she did not wholly wish to stay and that such a situation could not last long. Herr M——l kept her interested, and Seidl, whom he sent for to hear her practising for Siegfried, was most enthusiastic about her and displayed his admiration a little too strongly for our peace of mind. His was a developing, forcing influence, and Margarita showed the effect of it wonderfully; he inspired her to her best efforts, and Mme. M——i was terribly jealous of him. Personally, I could not but feel that his undoubtedly great influence upon her mind and methods represented one of his many invaluable contributions to the musical history of America—but I speak as an observer, merely, of an American artist, not as a husband!
Roger and he had what must be confessed was a quarrel (though the newspaper accounts of a duel were, of course, absurd) over the advisability of her singing privately for a young German princeling whom Seidl was very anxious to honour—he was then introducing the Wagnerian dramas into America and had not been long director of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. It all smoothed over and we agreed to forget it, all of us, but Seidl's pride was hurt and Roger had done what I had not seen him do for fifteen years—lost his temper badly. He was not pleasant in a temper, old Roger, like all men of strong, controlled natures, and Margarita learned a lesson that day that she never forgot, I suppose. I believe if on the strength of that impression he had carried her off bodily—flung her over his saddle-bow, as it were, and ceased to respect her rights for twenty-four hours, we should all have been spared much strain and suffering. But he regretted his violence and told her so, which was fatal, or so it seemed to me. There are occasions when not to take advantage of a woman is to be unfair to her, and Margarita was very much a woman.