The man who really loved her looked at her and forgave her foolishness. She had set the County buzzing with the tale of her absurd infatuation; she had compromised her dignity by the tragic follies of the past few months; there was but one way of gagging the scandalmongers and regaining lost ground, one way of getting out of the impasse. Galahad pointed out that way, as Laura entreated him to suggest something.
“Why not marry me?” he said bluntly.
“Oh, Galahad!” cried Laura, bright-eyed and quite pleasantly thrilled. “And then we can both adopt the boys.”
“Whether they embrace that idea or not,” said Galahad, with his arm round the long-coveted waist, “remains to be seen. But I promise you, if occasion should arise, that I will act as a father to them.”
He went out, in his new parental character, to look for Dosy and Brosy and break the joyful news. His freckled little face was beaming with smiles, his usually weary gray eyes were alight; he smiled under his bristly little mustache as he selected a stout but stinging Malacca cane from the late Thompson Kingdom’s collection in the hall....
A DISH OF MACARONI
On the occasion of the tenth biennial visit of the Carlo Da Capo Grand Opera Combination to the musical, if murky, city of Smutchester, the principal members of the company pitched their tents, as was their wont, at the Crown Diamonds Hotel, occupying an entire floor of that capacious caravanserie, whose chef, to the grief of many honest British stomachs and the unrestrained joy of these artless children of song, was of cosmopolitan gifts, being an Italian-Spanish-Swiss-German. Here prime donne, tenors, and bassos could revel in national dishes from which their palates had long been divorced, and steaming masses of yellow polenta, knüdels, and borsch, heaped dishes of sausages and red cabbage, ragouts of cockscombs and chicken-livers, veal stewed with tomatoes, frittura of artichokes, with other culinary delicacies strange of aspect and garlicky as to smell, loaded the common board at each meal, only to vanish like the summer snow, so seldom seen but so constantly referred to by the poetical fictionist, amidst a Babel of conversation which might only find its parallel in the parrot-house at the Zoo. Ringed hands plunged into salad-bowls; the smoke of cigarettes went up in the intervals between the courses; the meerschaum-colored lager of Munich, the yellow beer of Bass, the purple Chianti, or the vintage of Epernay brimmed the glasses; and the coffee that crowned the banquet was black and thick and bitter as the soul of a singer who has witnessed the triumph of a rival.
For singers can be jealous: and the advice of Dr. Watts is more at discount behind the operatic scenes, perhaps, than elsewhere. For women may be, and are, jealous of other women; and men may be, and are, jealous of men, off the stage; but it is reserved for the hero and heroine of the stage to be jealous of one another. The glare of the footlights, held by so many virtuous persons to be inimical to the rosebud of innocence, has a curiously wilting and shriveling effect upon the fine flower of chivalry. Signor Alberto Fumaroli, primo uomo, and possessor of a glorious tenor, was possessed by the idea that the chief soprano, De Melzi, the enchanting Teresa—still in the splendor of her youth, with ebony tresses, eyes of jet, skin of ivory, an almost imperceptible mustache, and a figure of the most seductive, doomed ere long to expand into a pronounced embonpoint—had adorned her classic temples with laurels which should by rights have decked his own. The press-cuttings of the previous weeks certainly balanced in her favor. Feeble-minded musical critics, of what the indignant tenor termed “provincial rags,” lauded the Signora to the skies. She was termed a “springing fountain of crystal song,” a “human bulbul in the rose-garden of melody.” Eulogy had exhausted itself upon her; while he, Alberto Fumaroli, the admired of empresses, master of the emotions of myriads of American millionairesses, he was fobbed off with half a dozen patronizing lines. Glancing over the paper in the saloon carriage, he had seen the impertinent upper lip of the De Melzi, tipped with the faintest line of shadow, curl with delight as she scanned each accursed column in turn, and handed the paper to her aunt (a vast person invariably clad in the tightest and shiniest of black satins, and crowned with a towering hat of violet velvet adorned with once snowy plumes and crushed crimson roses), who went everywhere with her niece, and mounted guard over the exchequer. Outwardly calm as Vesuvius, and cool as a Neapolitan ice on a hot day, the outraged Alberto endured the triumph of the women, marked the subterranean chuckles of the stout Signora, the mischievous enjoyment of Teresa; pulled his Austrian-Tyrolese hat over his Corsican brows, and vowed a wily vendetta. His opportunity for wreaking retribution would come at Smutchester, he knew. Wagner was to be given at the Opera House, and as great as the previous triumph of Teresa de Melzi in the rôle of Elsa—newly added by the soprano to her repertoire—should be her fall. Evviva! Down with that fatally fascinating face, smiling so provokingly under its laurels! She should taste the consequences of having insulted a Neapolitan. And the tenor smiled so diabolically that Zamboni, the basso, sarcastically inquired whether Fumaroli was rehearsing Mephistofole?
“Not so, dear friend,” Fumaroli responded, with a dazzling show of ivories. “In that part I should make a bel fiasco; I have no desire to emulate a basso or a bull.... But in this—the rôle in which I am studying to perfect myself—I predict that I shall achieve a dazzling success.” He drew out a green Russia-leather cigarette case, adorned with a monogram in diamonds. “It is permitted that one smokes?” he added, and immediately lighted up.
“It is permitted, if I am to have one also.”