“Estote prudentes sicuti serpentes,” said Castellani. “There’s a fine old ecclesiastic’s motto for you. I know Lady Millborough rather dreads the effect of sunlight upon her nacre Bernhardt. She told me that she was never equal to singing in the afternoon: the glare of the sun always gave her a headache. But I assured her in the first place that there should be no glare—that as an artist I abhorred a crude, white light—and that it should be my business to see that our concert-room was lighted upon purely æsthetic principles. We would have the dim religious light which painters and poets love. In the second place I assured her that she had as fine a contralto as Madame Alboni, on whose knees I had often sat as a child, and who gave me the emerald pin I was wearing.”
“My hat, what a man you are!” exclaimed Rollinson. “But do you mean to say we are to give our concert in the dark?”
“We will not have the afternoon sun blinding half our audience. We will have the auditorium in a cool twilight, and we will have lamp-light on our platform—just that mellow and flattering light in which elderly women look young and young women angelic.”
“We’ll leave everything to you,” cried the curate. “I think we ought to leave him free scope; ought we not, Mrs. Greswold?”
Mildred assented. Pamela was enthusiastic. This concert was to be one of the events of her life. Castellani had discovered that she possessed a charming mezzo-soprano. She was to sing a duet with him. O, what rapture! A duet of his own composition, all about roses and love and death.
“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
If I had but lived for thee;
A life as long as the nightingale’s song
Were enough for my heart and me.”
The words and the voices were interwoven in a melodious web; tenor and soprano entwined together—following and ever following like the phrases in an anthem.