“But very likely there is no piano there! You see, this is a difficulty I did not think of. I have heard this lady only in the house of—one of my relations, a very rigid old person, who hates theatres, and thinks opera an invention of the devil.” How Rollo dared slander poor Lady Caroline so, who liked an opera-box as well as any one else, it is impossible to say.
“Well—it doesn’t seem to matter much what are the qualities of the voice if we can’t hear it,” the Manager said carelessly; and he told his fashionable partner of the singer he had heard of in Milan, who was to distance all the singers then on the operatic stage. “They are all like that,” he said—“like this private nightingale of yours, Ridsdale—till you hear them; and then they turn out to be very much like the rest. To tell the truth, I am not so very sorry this particular protégée of yours has broken down; for I don’t believe the time has come for an English prima donna, if it ever comes. We’ve got no confidence in ourselves, so far as art goes—especially musical art. English opera, sir; there’s many fine pieces, but you’ll never keep it up in England. It might make a hit, perhaps, in Germany, or even France, but not here. Your English prima donna would be considered fit for the music halls. We’d have to dress her up in vowels, and turn her into an Italian. Contemptible? Oh, yes, it’s contemptible; but, if we’re to make our own money out of it, we mustn’t trouble ourselves about what’s contemptible. What we’ve got to do is to please the public. I’m just as glad that this idea of yours has broken down.”
“Broken down! I will never allow it has broken down. It is much easier and pleasanter, of course, to go to Milan than to go to St. Michael’s,” said Rollo disdainfully. “But never mind; if you don’t start till Monday, trust me to arrange it somehow. Your new Milanese, of course, will be like all the rest. She will have been brought up to it. She will know how to do one thing, and no more; but this is genius—owing nothing to education and everything to nature. Capable of—I could not say what such a voice and such a woman is not capable of——”
“Bravo, Ridsdale!” said his partner. “She is capable of stirring you up thoroughly, that is clear—and I hope she will be kind to you,” he said, with a big laugh, full of insinuations. The man was vulgar and fat, but a mountain of energy, and Rollo though disgusted, could not afford to quarrel with him.
“You are entirely out in your notion,” he said, with that air of dignity which is apt to look fictitious in such circumstances. He was not himself easily shocked, nor would this interpretation of his motives have appeared to him at all unlikely in the case of another man; therefore, as was natural, his gravity and look of disgust only confirmed the suspicions of the other, and amused him the more.
“Bravo, my boy; go in and win!” he said, chuckling; “promise whatever you like, if you find it necessary, and trust to me to back you up.”
To say “I am unable to understand what you mean,” as Rollo did, with cold displeasure, yet consciousness, did but increase the ecstasy of the fat Manager over the evident fact that his fastidious friend was “caught at last.”
Rollo went away with a great deal of offended dignity, holding himself stiffly erect, body and soul. He had never been so entirely disgusted, revolted, by the coarse character of the ideas and insinuations, which in themselves were not particularly novel, he was aware. It was because everything grew coarse under the touch of such a fellow as this, he said to himself; and it must be allowed that vice, stripped of all sentiment and adornment, was a disgusting spectacle. Rollo had never been a vicious man. He had taken it calmly in others, acknowledging that, if they liked it, he had no right to interfere; but he had not cared for it much himself—he was not a man of passions. A dilettante generally does avoid these coarser snares of humanity; and there had always been a sense of nausea in his mind when he was brought in contact with the vicious. But this nausea had been more physical than spiritual. It was not virtue but temperament which produced it; his own temptations were not in this kind. Nevertheless, he knew that to show any exaggerated feeling on the subject would only expose him to laughter, and he was not courageous enough either to blame warmly in others, or to decry strenuously in himself, the existence of unlawful bonds. What did it matter to anybody if he were virtuous? his neighbours were not on that account to be baulked of their cakes and ale; his disinclination towards sins of the grosser kind was not a thing he was proud of—it was a constitutional peculiarity, like inability to ascend heights or to go to sea without suffering. He was not at all sure that it was not a sign of weakness—a thing to be kept out of sight. Accordingly he took his part in the social gossip, which has no warmer interest than this, like everybody else, never pretended to any superiority, and took it for granted that now and then everybody “went wrong.” He would have been a monster if he had done anything else. Why, even his good aunt Caroline—the best and stupidest of women, to whom, if she had desired it, no opportunity of going wrong had ever presented itself—liked to hear these stories and believed them implicitly, and was convinced that not to go wrong was quite exceptional. Rollo was not the man to emancipate himself from such a complete and universal understanding. He allowed it calmly, and did not pretend either to disapprove or to doubt. Probably he had himself coldly, and as a matter of course, “gone wrong” too in his day, and certainly he had never given himself out as at all better than his neighbours. Was it only the coarseness of his vulgar associate which made the suggestion so deeply disgusting to him now?
He asked himself this question as, disappointed and annoyed, he left the Manager’s ostentatious rooms; and a new sense of unkindness, ungenerosity, unmanliness in having exposed a harmless person, a woman whose reputation should be sacred, to such animadversions, suddenly came into his mind, he could not tell how. This view of the matter had never occurred to Rollo before. The women he had heard discussed—and he had heard almost everybody discussed, from the highest to the lowest—had nothing sacred about them to the laughing gossips who discussed all they had done, or might have done, or might be going to do. This, too, was a new idea to him. Who was there whom he had not heard spoken of? ladies a thousand times more important than Miss Despard, the poor Chevalier’s daughter at St. Michael’s—and nobody had seemed to think there was any harm in it. A man’s duty not to let a woman be lightly spoken of? Pooh! What an exaggerated sentimental piece of nonsense! Why should not women take their chance, like any one else? Rollo was like most other persons when in a mental difficulty of this kind. He was not so much discussing with himself as he was the arena of a discussion which unseen arguers were holding within him. While one of these uttered this Pooh! another replied, with a heat and fervour altogether unknown to the clubs, What had Lottie Despard done to subject herself to these suggestions? she who knew nothing about society and its evil thoughts—she who had it in her to be uplifted and transported by the music at which these other people, at the best, would clap their hands and applaud. The argument in Rollo’s mind went all against himself and his class. He hated not only his manager-partner, whom it was perfectly right and natural to hate, but himself and all the rest of his kind. He was so much disgusted, that he almost made up his mind to let fortune and the English prima donna go together, and to take no further step to make the girl known to those who were so incapable of appreciating her. But when he came that length, Rollo had reached the end of his tether, struck against the uttermost limits of his horizon—and thus was brought back suddenly to the question how he was best to make his prize known?