“She is one of my oldest cases, and mild as a lamb,” he said. “She is what superstition had made her. She might have been a happy wife as a mother but for that fatal influence. Ah, here comes a lady of a very different temper, and not half so easy a subject!”
A woman of about sixty advanced towards them along the dusty gravel path between the trampled grass and the dust-whitened orange-trees, a woman who carried her head and shoulders with the pride of an empress, and who looked about her with defiant eyes, fanning herself with a large Japanese paper fan as she came along, a fan of vivid scarlet and cheap gilt paper, which seemed to intensify the brightness of her great black eyes, as she waved it to and fro before her haggard face: a woman who must once have been beautiful.
“Would you believe that lady was prima donna at La Scala nearly forty years ago?” asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood beside the path, watching that strange figure, with its theatrical dignity.
The massive plaits of grizzled black hair were wound, coronet-wise, about the woman’s head. Her rusty black velvet gown trailed in the dust, threadbare long ago, almost in tatters to-day: a gown of a strange fashion, which had been worn upon the stage—Leonora’s or Lucrezia’s gown, perhaps, once upon a time.
At sight of the physician she stopped suddenly, and made him a sweeping curtsy, with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre.
“Do you know if they open this month at the Scala?” she asked, in Italian.
“Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing of their doings.”
“They might have begun their season with the new year,” she said, with a dictatorial air. “They always did in my time. Of course you know that they have tried to engage me again. They wanted me for Amina, but I had to remind them that I am not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my own ground. No one can touch me there.”
She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s first scena. The once glorious voice was rough and discordant, but there was power in the tones even yet, and real dramatic fire in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly while she was singing she caught the expression of Mildred’s face watching her, and she stopped at a breath, and grasped the stranger by both hands with an excited air.
“That moves you, does it not?” she exclaimed. “You have a soul for music. I can see that in your face. I should like to know more of you. Come and see me whenever you like, and I will sing to you. The doctor lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is in a good humour.”