"If I could only keep the same visions before me that I have here alone, I should sing well to-night," she said to herself; "for now, when I sing 'Casta Diva,' I seem to be sitting with my arm round dear little Flora, watching the moon as it rises above the dark pines on that lonely island."
At last the dreaded hour came. Rosa appeared on the stage with her train of priestesses. The orchestra and the audience were before her; and she knew that Papa and Mamma Balbino were watching her from the side with anxious hearts. She was very pale, and her first notes were a little tremulous. But her voice soon became clear and strong; and when she fixed her eyes on the moon, and sang "Casta Diva," the fulness and richness of the tones took everybody by surprise.
"Bis! Bis!" cried the audience; and the chorus was not allowed to proceed till she had sung it a second and third time. She courtesied her acknowledgments gracefully. But as she retired, ghosts of the past went with her; and with her heart full of memories, she seemed to weep in music, while she sang in Italian, "Restore to mine affliction one smile of love's protection." Again the audience shouted, "Bis! Bis!"
The duet with Adalgisa was more difficult; for she had not yet learned to be an actress, and she was embarrassed by the consciousness of being an object of jealousy to the seconda donna, partly because she was prima, and partly because the tenor preferred her. But when Adalgisa sang in Italian the words, "Behold him!" she chanced to raise her eyes to a box near the stage, and saw the faces of Gerald Fitzgerald and his wife bending eagerly toward her. She shuddered, and for an instant her voice failed her. The audience were breathless. Her look, her attitude, her silence, her tremor, all seemed inimitable acting. A glance at the foot-lights and at the orchestra recalled the recollection of where she was, and by a strong effort she controlled herself; though there was still an agitation in her voice, which the audience and the singers thought to be the perfection of acting. Again she glanced at Fitzgerald, and there was terrible power in the tones with which she uttered, in Italian, "Tremble, perfidious one! Thou knowest the cause is ample."
Her eyes rested for a moment on Mrs. Fitzgerald, and with a wonderful depth of pitying sadness, she sang, "O, how his art deceived thee!"
The wish she had formed was realized. She was enabled to give voice to her own emotions, forgetful of the audience for the time being. And even in subsequent scenes, when the recollection of being a performer returned upon her, her inward excitation seemed to float her onward, like a great wave.
Once again her own feelings took her up, like a tornado, and made her seem a wonderful actress. In the scene where Norma is tempted to kill her children, she fixed her indignant gaze full upon Fitzgerald, and there was an indescribable expression of stern resolution in her voice, and of pride in the carriage of her queenly head, while she sang: "Disgrace worse than death awaits them. Slavery? No! never!"
Fitzgerald quailed before it. He grew pale, and slunk back in the box. The audience had never seen the part so conceived, and a few criticised it. But her beauty and her voice and her overflowing feeling carried all before her; and this, also, was accepted as a remarkable inspiration of theatrical genius.
When the wave of her own excitement was subsiding, the magnetism of an admiring audience began to affect her strongly. With an outburst of fury, she sang, "War! War!" The audience cried, "Bis! Bis!" and she sang it as powerfully the second time.
What it was that had sustained and carried her through that terrible ordeal, she could never understand.